Catering for a large population

[Livingston I Presume]

Late game cooking requires a large portion of my personal to be chefs, I've lowered my standards of skill down to level 6 and I still don't have enough chefs.  What are strategies and ideas for speeding up your chefs?  Because right now they're cooking slower than our income of food and we eat the meals faster than they can make them.  Meaning my colonists decide eating raw meat instead of corn is  a smashing idea.  It's honestly more of a problem than tribal raids right now.

[REMworlder]

It sounds like the chefs and their cooking stations are definitely the bottlenecks.

A picture of your setup would be cool!

Probably the simplest way to maximise your cook efficiency is to reduce the time your cooks spend doing non-value added activities, or anything where they aren't glued to the stove cooking:
-Do you have your raw food storage and finished meal storage near where your colonists are cooking? One action you can take is have your cooks drop meals at their feet as soon as they're finished instead of hauling the meal, an option in the cooking tab.
-Are the paths your cooks travel paved (this is more important for growers and miners).
-Do your cooks live near where they work? Do they have good beds to reduce sleeping time? Are they happy so they get the happiness productivity boost?

One thing to keep in mind is settlers throwing meals into their inventories to chow on later can make demand seem a bit bigger than it is due to minor hoarding, so you can end up with interesting demand bubbles where suddenly your meal surplus gets chunked.

[Limdood]

have you tried narrower stockpiles?

As in, a 3x3 stockpile of food, 2 or 3 cook tables next to it, then a 5x5 stockpile of meals?

bionic legs/arms might help you out too, but bionics for cooking? eh.

I've heard lots of people swear by a small, 2 square stockpile set to critical next to the cook stove, then a similarly small stockpile for the food next to it as close as possible to the dining room, but i haven't actually tried anything that small.

I have a 22 person colony and simply having a 13x13 stockpile freezer with the cook stove inside is good enough for me...i JUST upgraded to 2 cook stoves and now i have a 400 meal padding in my freezer for when a couple cooks get ill or something.

[Livingston I Presume]

Yeah stockpiles and haulers sounds like a good strat, but for a 40+ colony I'll have to see.  I was imagining how perfect a conveyor belt would be, but that's what Farm Oafs are for I guess. 

[Livingston I Presume]

I'll try get a screen shot

[TLHeart]

Don't need conveyor belts, just good cooks, a pair working the day shift, and a pair working the night shift. Short walk to the freezer. A couple of prep cooks on the day shift to brew and butcher, that have other jobs helps.

[zandadoum]

fridge next to kitchen, but even so: stockpile for raw materials around the cooking stove. have 1 cook and table per each 10-15 colonists or so.

in distances, this is what i have:

kitchen stove->raw material temp. stockpile-->fridge--->hydroponics-------->regular crops

and 25 wild boars doing the hauling

[Livingston I Presume]

and 25 wild boars doing the hauling

I'm still playing on 11, so no animals but still when I start on  12 I'm planning on having a fair few different animals.

[harpo99999]

boars are very useful, I have a colony of 35 with over 60 boars (30 haulling rest too small yet(they grow in less than a year to haul size) and they bread like pigs(get a large number easily and when you have too many then you can start culling the less healthy/older)).
and another trick to help the production of meals (I do not use this often but it works) is to put the stoves in the freezer between the raw food and meals stockpiles with smoothed stone floors

[METATERREN]

I spend up my kitchen in these ways..

Set chefs to drop food on the floor when done cooking.

Use a cooking room and the freezer as two separate rooms to prevent cooks from getting the hideous environment debuff and going mad. Make both rooms cold enough to preserve food, you can simply refrigerate the cooking room (to preserve the dropped meals) if you don't have parkas on your cooks. For the passage between the kitchen and the freezer use an autodoor or hold open on the door.

[Wex]

Since you seem to coock a lot, a smal stockpile, near your cooking station, only for food is a necessity. It won't spoil, since you are cooking all the time.
Have a lot of haulers, and make your cooks drop the food where they cook it.