Developing a professional competence scale for kitchen staff: Food value and availability for surplus food

The aim of this research was to establish a scale of surplus food professional competence for kitchen staff. The research mainly explored three sections: knowledge competency, attitude competency, and skill competency. The dimensions of the scale were developed through exploratory factor analysis with knowledge competences, including the two dimensions of sanitation knowledge and culinary knowledge; attitude competences, including the three dimensions of personal moral attitude, food handling, education and training; and skill competences, including the two dimensions of menu analysis and planning and management. The results for the scale indicated good discriminant validity, convergent validity and reliability. The model comparison showed that the twolevel-three-factor model was significantly better than the other models.