Glory Restaurant & Catering first began their purposeful mission in 2008; catering meals to Bangladeshi foreign workers based in Singapore. Being one of the few well-established foreign worker caterers in Singapore, Glory Restaurant & Catering is popularly known amongst the workers and their companies as “Aman Catering”, named after the restaurant’s manager, Mr Aman.
Glory Restaurant caters three full meals daily for Bangladeshi workers all year round. The Bangladeshi dishes are freshly cooked, packed and delivered to dormitories and their worksites.
Recognising the Need for Job-Redesigning
Bangladeshi dishes usually consist of a variety of curry and spiced dishes that go well with rice. Hence there is rice in almost every catered meal. As the number of foreign workers increase each year, Glory Restaurant finds themself cooking much more rice for thousands of workers every day. To date, the restaurant’s kitchen cooks as much as 15 traditional gas rice cookers of rice each day. These traditional gas rice cookers, operated by the restaurant since 2008, emitted high temperatures in the cooking process. This unfortunately heats up the kitchen to an uncomfortable degree.
To make matters worse, in the midst of the warm working environment, workers in the kitchen had to laboriously carry the rice cookers loaded with cooked rice to a bigger pot—just to transfer the rice for packing. These rice cookers, weighing up to approximately 20kg each, were then carried back to be reloaded again for subsequent cooking.
This cook-and-transfer process was often repeated for five times before the daily cooked rice requirement was fulfilled. Workers were often injured during the transportation of rice to the massive rice cookers. For older workers, this operation was undoubtedly even more high-risk and demanding to them.
NTUC’s e2i WorkPro Job Redesign Scheme
In hopes of improving the rice-cooking process, Glory Restaurant invested in a batch of automatic energy-saving commercial steamer generators to replace the traditional gas cookers in 2020, with the assistance of NTUC’s Employment and Employability Institute’s (e2i) WorkPro Job Redesign Scheme. The Scheme provides support to companies to assist their older workers in terms of workplace safety as well as increase overall productivity of the companies.
With the large cooking capacity of the new steamers, workers are only required to load the daily required amount of rice grains into each steamer once. Without the need to repeat the cooking process, the cooking time is reduced immensely. When the rice is ready, it is then scooped out from the steamers in trays of maximum 10kg to the packing pot. Compared to hauling 20kg rice cookers through multiple trips previously, this 50% reduction in the amount of load each worker had to carry around was no doubt greatly appreciated by the workers.
With the cooking process now much easier, safer and efficient, Glory Restaurant has since marked an increase of 50% in productivity. Manpower hours to prepare rice has also halved from six hours to three hours. Overall, the productivity increase also brought about an increment for eight older workers in the company.
Preparing for the Forthcoming Years
In the following years, as foreign workers assist Singapore in our recovery from the impact brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, Glory Restaurant will be extending their efforts to support more foreign workers with catered meals. As such, the restaurant will be stepping up on recruitment to cater to the upcoming increasing orders. They remain dedicated to constantly boost the company’s efficiency and production capacity, so as to continue to provide only the freshest and finest quality food to their customers—a promise they had unwaveringly delivered for the past decade.
Glory Restaurant & Catering
Blk 1010 Aljunied Ave 4, #01-16, Singapore 389911
Tel: 9272 9475
Email: gloryrnc@gmail.com
