[MrMarsh]

Explain your suggestion, in detail: Add a timer for food to become either stale (and loose around 50% of its nurishment) or spolied (and either be removed or kept a as spolied food to be sold to the new NPC). The Timer should be different for the various kinds of foods with something like Icecream or stake spoiling faster then beverages, cake etc. This would add a bit of realism to it and also add some variety to the food collection (so besides price and nurishment, the "best before" time would be a third factor that can be factored in and make otherwise less desirable cooking items more appealing)

The decay timer should not nescessarly seek to be realistic in the full sense. Id say having a week as the minimal decay time would already be sufficient to eliminate most of the oversupply issue as it is nearly impossible to blow through 200 cans of icrecream or sweetrolls in a week.
This way it would not be too much of an inconvenience whilst still encouraging people to regularly stock up.

Explain why the suggestion should be implemented: I have seen the current discussion regarding how to make chefs or civilians acting as chefs more viable quite important. Yet i see the problem with chef based RP beeing underused to lie on the inventory management side.
Players with enough playtime and capital usually have a very large inventory capacity and grinding through the cooking and fishing levels requites tons of very good food to be produced. (Grinding a single level in cooking will usually leave you with around 100-200 items of the same food which itself could give you anywhere between 20-60% hungerrestoration per item.
I often findmyself at a point where im throwign away 50 burgers 70 icecream or giveaway stacks of unused fried eggs. etc.
So i recon the issue with few people currently roleplaying as a chef is first and foremost a complete oversaturation of the market, a lack of need for a short term food supply and thus a lack of customers beyond people trying to engage in the RP itself.

If we dont decrease our inventory cap or change the ammount of cooking items required for the level progress (eg. half the items beeing required with double the production time). Both options would probably be harder to implement and definatly would have unwelcome sideffects. The only option to stop the dramatic oversupply and incentivise people to buy food from an existing market is to remove unescessarily high stockpiles of food over time.

The somewhat long decay timer would grant some convenience (you could still comfortably stock up for a longer rp session days in advance etc.) whilst ensuring that the self produced oversupply resulting from the level grind would be taken out of the system.
This would also incentivise people currently grinding their cooking to do so in public (as a merchant) in order to make some money of their surplus food before it goes stale. So it would probably fix parts of both the supply and demand issue.
This solution would have the added benefit of not relying on a fixed chef role, or any somewhat exlusive items.

[Limelight Gaming]

Thank you for your suggestion, MrMarsh!

It will take a while for it to be reviewed by our staff-members.
Meanwhile, expect some nice feedback from our community.