Final 12 months, Taco Bell launched an “early retirement expertise.” The senior dwelling trade can be taught a factor or two from the nationwide fast-food chain.
Taco Bell’s occasion – “a senior-inspired, sun-soaked” daytime getaway filled with “retail and eating” – was definitely exterior of its typical wheelhouse. By that token, the senior dwelling trade has an identical alternative to suppose exterior the field.
Senior dwelling operators know the pattern so nicely they virtually needn’t be acknowledged: the boomers are poised to reach and disrupt each aspect of senior dwelling operations, from facilities and unit design to programming and particularly culinary providers.
Operators are making ready for his or her arrival partly by designing new menus that transcend conventional eating choices of the previous. Becoming in with that theme, corporations together with Atria Senior Dwelling, LCS and Discovery Senior Dwelling are working below the assumption that it doesn’t matter what, senior dwelling operators should method the present period with an perspective of change.
Pushing that change is the truth that senior dwelling eating areas aren’t simply competing with each other, they’re additionally competing with all the eating places in a neighborhood’s wider space.
“We have to do a greater job of being progressive. We have to push the envelope. We must be inventive,” Matt Garnett, regional meals and beverage director for LCS, stated throughout a panel dialogue on the 2025 Senior Housing Information DISHED convention in Atlanta. “The large factor is, let’s be totally different.”
Getting previous the ‘scoop-and-serve’ stigma
Batch cooking. Lengthy strains. Buffet-style. Not way back, one may need used these phrases to explain the standard senior dwelling eating expertise.
Whereas many senior dwelling operators have pivoted from these days to extra restaurant experiences, as we speak’s prospects may not know that.
“Senior dwelling has historically had a stigma the place it’s … scoop-and-serve,” Garnett stated.
Picture by TBAR Productions for WTWH Media Picture by TBAR Productions for WTWH MediaBeating that stigma is why senior dwelling operators spend a great quantity of effort and time exhibiting potential residents that their eating experiences can stack up in opposition to any native restaurant. Senior dwelling residents usually come from an space about seven to fifteen miles surrounding the neighborhood, and anticipate the identical stage of service and high quality as their favourite eating places and low retailers.
The problem for senior dwelling operators is matching that stage of service and high quality whereas contending with all of their different operational pressures. LCS is responding to that problem by elevating its menus with plant-based, vegan and gluten-free fare.
“The residents are asking for this stuff,” stated John Vogelmeier, vp of culinary providers at Discovery Senior Dwelling. “It’s our job to not solely present that, but in addition be on the forefront.”
Discovery trains its government cooks to suppose exterior the field every time attainable, and the operator has at some communities organized occasions together with outside barbecues and meals truck fiestas. Such occasions are so fashionable that the operator has been in a position to promote tickets to residents and their households to assist offset the prices of organizing them.
Atria’s leaders have the philosophy that participating residents and creating memorable occasions are “tremendous vital,” based on John Hetzel, the corporate’s vp of culinary providers. The corporate holds enjoyable occasions in sure communities, like a Chopped-style cooking competitors at its Hudson Yards property in New York Metropolis that pit the neighborhood’s cooks in opposition to these of native eating places.
“The residents beloved it they usually bought to style lots of superb meals,” Hetzel stated in the course of the DISHED panel. “We had been in a position to get some nice press, too.”
Assembly expectations of the ‘meals revolution’ technology
The child boomers have internalized a long time of meals tendencies as they’ve aged, together with the “meals revolution” of the Nineties. Their starvation for recent fare, new delicacies and upscale experiences gained’t stop simply because they transfer right into a senior dwelling neighborhood.
In 2025, senior dwelling eating is “extra concerning the expertise now that it ever has been,” Garnett stated. Small-plates, pop-ups and different fashionable meal codecs are gaining reputation with each passing 12 months.
“It’s not simply the meals and drinks … it’s integration along with your well being and wellness group, your nursing group, your advertising and marketing group, your actions group – all of issues create a nicely rounded eating program,” he added.
However it may be arduous to cater to all of these totally different tastes in a single venue, Garnett added. That’s the reason LCS creates distinctive eating venues and experiences which have their very own menus and identities.
LCS equally types communities with different eating venues that cater to native tastes as a consequence of the truth that “somebody in Kansas Metropolis needs to eat a special meal than somebody in New York Metropolis,” Hetzel stated.
“We would like cooks to be in contact with their local people, in contact with what their residents need,” Hetzel stated.
Staffing is likely one of the nice limiting components for senior dwelling, and eating isn’t any exception.
Senior dwelling operators have thousands and thousands of potential residents to feed within the years to come back, however that’s amid common challenges operators have hiring staff and preserving them.
Operators like LCS may need a tough time hiring culinary staff provided that eating places – together with these with tipped positions – are already vying for them. However senior dwelling operators can provide one thing many eating places can’t: a way of goal and dedication to the higher good.
“If we will be sure that our mission, imaginative and prescient and worth statements are clearly articulated and intertwined with what our workers do, then we’re extra more likely to retain them, to maintain them, to have them be engaged and be considerate contributors to our group,” Garnett stated.
To Vogelmeier, senior dwelling communities had been as soon as locations the place cooks and different culinarians went looking for nights and weekends, and a typically simpler schedule. However “we have to change that mindset,” he stated.
“This youthful technology, they need goal,” Vogelmeier added.
Backside-line, “the times of the 150-seat most important eating room are behind us,” Garnett stated.
“We are able to create distinctive venues that senior dwelling hasn’t seen earlier than,” he stated.
The submit ‘Let’s Be Completely different’: How Discovery, LCS, Atria Elevate Senior Dwelling Culinary Packages appeared first on Senior Housing Information.
