This paper aims to study a real case of an optimization problem derived from a hospital supply chain. The present work focuses on developing operational decision support models and algorithms for production process scheduling in hospital catering. The addressed production system is considered as a flexible job shop system. The objective is to minimize the total flow time. A novel mathematical model and two metaheuristics for the production scheduling of multi-product and multi-stage food processes are developed. These methods have proven their effectiveness for the scheduling of operations of the food production processes and allowed significant improvements in the performance of the studied production system.