The existence of the global hospitality industry not only depends only the personalised service, for achieving the customer satisfaction, but also quality food and authentic culinary practices that will retain the valuable guests and helps in the brand building and image creation. In the present scenario, there is a paradigm shift and revolutionary changes of ‘servicescape’ to ‘production scape’, among the hotel employees and the customers. Quality and customer satisfaction are two most essential ingredients for success of global hospitality industry. Various major departments of hotels contribute more or lesss towards customer satisfaction keeping in mind the quality tag. In every hotel business major revenues are generated from the food production department, hence it is regarded as one of the central point. In 21st century, customers are more concerned about the food they are eating and the how the food is prepared, that is the centre stage of discussion lading to the gastronomic and culinary sensibility of the smart customers. In the present scenario, it has been developed as gastronomy and culinary tourism. The wellness mind-frame of customers has intensified the food preparation employees to adopt and follow the best culinary practices during food preparation process. Though from decades, ‘SERVQUAL’ has been used to measure the degree of customer satisfaction and quality of frontline staffs, but no such instrument has been developed to measure the quality food and food preparation practices by kitchen staffs. Hence the researcher has endeavoured to devise the ‘PRODQUAL’ model on a theoretical basis and further it has been analysed in the research parlance.
Keywords: Production, Quality, Customer satisfaction, Food
