Senior Living Dining Challenges and Solutions That Work
The 8 Biggest Challenges in Senior Living Dining Operations - and How to Solve Them
Providing nutritional food to our aging population is a labor of love, but it isn’t always an easy one — especially in senior living communities. Older adults often have complex and unique nutritional needs, and they may also have medical conditions that impact how and what they eat. Malnutrition in seniors is a growing problem, especially as the population of 65+ adults continues to grow and people live longer lives.
Every day, independent living, assisted living, and senior living communities work tirelessly to ensure residents have access to healthy meals, but there are many obstacles to overcome. However, with the right tools and strategies — and the right software — the most common senior living dining challenges can be resolved.
Top 8 Challenges (and Solutions) in the Senior Living Dining Experience
What challenges are most senior living communities struggling with when it comes to dining? Let’s look at the top 8 challenges along with practical solutions that will help you create a dining experience your residents love.
1. Accommodating Special Dietary Needs and Allergies
Accommodating dietary restrictions and other nutritional needs is a significant challenge when planning your dining services. Seniors often have specific requirements due to health conditions, medications, and personal preferences. Cultural and religious factors can also influence their dietary needs. In a senior or assisted living community with dozens or hundreds of residents, you’ll need a trustworthy way to plan menus for a range of distinct diets.
How to Make Your Menu More Inclusive
While it’s not always feasible to customize every meal for each resident, you can still offer inclusive dining options that cater to a variety of diets. The top priority should be managing food allergies and medical restrictions to maintain the wellness of your residents. If you’re still handling this manually, it might be time for an upgrade. A senior dining software platform can help you easily and accurately manage allergies, intolerances, therapeutic textures and other dietary restrictions. This not only ensures residents are eating food that’s safe and healthy, which provides peace of mind for them and their loved ones, but also frees up your time to plan menus with more variety, including vegetarian, kosher, and gluten-free options.
2. Maintaining Resident Satisfaction
As we mentioned, personal preference plays a big role in whether a resident is satisfied with the meal selection in your senior community. While it’s true that you can’t please everyone all the time, we know you always aim to try. Offering a varied and robust cycle of menu items made with fresh ingredients is important, but food selection is just one piece of the puzzle. The overall dining experience also has a huge impact on resident satisfaction and their sense of well-being. This includes the style of dining your community offers, the atmosphere of the dining space, and even how easy it is to select delicious meals and make payments. It can also include ease of payment and menu selection. If any part of the process feels like a hassle, residents may become frustrated, and some might even skip meals altogether.
How to Keep Your Residents Happy
There are many ways to improve resident satisfaction with your community’s food services. Consider introducing new dining styles, like restaurant-style service or casual bistro seating, and offer flexible meal times to make dining more convenient and accessible. Make your executive chef the star, and feature chef-prepared meals to generate excitement. Additionally, having the best point-of-sale system also makes a huge impact. When residents have the ability to quickly access their accounts to reserve a table, plan their meals, and even place their orders, they are more likely to have a positive experience.
3. Balancing Quality with Cost Control
There’s no denying that the cost of food has gone up in recent years. With inflation, buying the freshest, locally sourced ingredients — without passing on huge cost increases to residents — can be a big challenge. You want to provide quality food at a price that feels reasonable to residents and their family members while ensuring your culinary team has the resources it needs to deliver an excellent dining program. Unfortunately, you can’t change the price of food, but you can plan and prepare by collecting and analyzing your own senior dining data.
How Advanced Reporting Tools Can Help
It might feel like a stretch to say that data can save you money on food costs, but there’s plenty of evidence to support it. See how one senior living community balanced costs with the right dining software, and then check out our case study on how this software can significantly increase revenue. By analyzing order history, you can identify areas of waste and minimize loss without sacrificing quality. You can also combine analytics with other cost-saving methods, like sourcing food from local suppliers or planning seasonal menus using ingredients that are easy to acquire in your area.
4. Handling Labor Shortages and Staffing Issues
Managing staff shortages in senior dining is an ongoing challenge that’s not likely to disappear anytime soon. Many employees in senior dining report professional burnout and lower pay as reasons for leaving their positions. Additionally, changing regulations in assisted living and long-term care communities can contribute to higher turnover. While recruitment and retention can be tricky, you can attract and retain top talent by rethinking your workplace culture and creating a plan to improve employee engagement.
How to Reduce the Time and Labor Needed to Manage Dining Services
Even with a dedicated and engaged culinary team, there will still be times when you're short-handed. That’s where a senior dining software solution can be your digital partner. With easy-to-use features that make training simple, the software enhances efficiency by using printers for tickets instead of handwriting, keeping servers in the dining room with residents rather than running back and forth to the kitchen. Implementing a system like this can also make your workplace more attractive to top talent, demonstrating your commitment to improving their work experience and delivering exceptional service to your residents.
5. Creating Complex Menu Options
As mentioned above, unique dietary needs and medical restrictions can significantly complicate menu planning in any senior living community. It becomes even more complex when trying to create personalized, healthy menus that accommodate other diets, such as low-carb or heart-healthy ones. Residents, of course, want variety and choice, but creating new meals all the time just isn’t realistic.
How Customizable Cycle Menus Can Help
Menu cycling offers a great way to introduce diversity and variety to your residents on a daily or weekly basis. With a format that can be repeated over time, your team can automate tasks like ordering and ingredient preparation. A cycle menu also gives residents the option to customize their meal selections, allowing you to better meet their dietary restrictions and preferences all while reducing the workload for your staff.
6. Reducing Food Waste
It’s staggering, but an estimated 30-40% of all food in the U.S. goes to waste. Not only does this have an incredibly detrimental impact on the environment, but it also results in higher food costs and increased spending for your organization. When your menus or dining services aren’t satisfactory to residents, or you don’t consider their individual dietary needs, food waste is the result. Ultimately, their costs go up, your community costs go up, and the cycle continues.
How to Limit Food Waste
Reducing food waste isn’t just about menu planning — it’s about offering the right options for each resident. With a customizable menu system, residents are more likely to choose and enjoy meals that suit their needs. Senior dining software helps create flexible menu cycles that residents can personalize, resulting in less waste and more resident satisfaction.
7. Meeting Regulatory Requirements
Food safety rules from the USDA and FDA change often to help prevent contamination and spoilage. It's important to keep up with these changes and make sure your dining team is properly trained to follow the latest guidelines. Staying on top of regulations helps keep your residents safe and your community compliant.
How to Ensure Food Safety Compliance
First, understand the current food handling regulations from the relevant governing bodies. Make sure you conduct regular training for staff members and that you have a food service manager on-site who understands how to practice safe meal preparation, service, and delivery. You can also rely on your senior dining software to support your culinary team and make sure all meals are safe and compliant with food safety standards.
8. Managing Guest and Staff Meals
Tracking and managing staff and guest meals can be a bit of an afterthought at times, as it may seem like less of a priority than serving healthy, safe, and nutrient-rich meals to your residents. However, guest dining and staff dining can have a big impact on family satisfaction and employee engagement, so it should be carefully planned.
How to Make Meal Tracking More Seamless
Guest and staff meals can get lost in the shuffle of a busy mealtime, leading to revenue loss and disruptions in the data that can change the way your team plans and orders menu items. With trusted senior dining software, you can include guest and staff meal tracking to improve revenue capture and control your costs.
How eMenuCHOICE Solves Senior Living Dining Challenges
Notice a common theme among our recommended solutions? If you guessed “senior dining software,” you’re spot on. An effective software, like the senior living dining software from eMenuCHOICE, can act as a digital partner and collaborator to your culinary team. It streamlines your daily operations, making tasks like menu planning, ordering, and meal tracking much easier. Plus, it keeps residents safe by managing dietary restrictions and allergies, all while boosting satisfaction with customizable menu options. On top of it all, the software also helps you spot and cut unnecessary costs. This helps you run a more efficient and waste-conscious dining service that still meets the unique needs of your residents, keeping them happy and well-fed.
How to Get Started With eMenuCHOICE
Everything we’ve discussed above can easily be put into action with eMenuCHOICE. Our straightforward onboarding and hands-on training will have you and your team using the platform in no time, and you'll see the benefits right away. But don’t just take our word for it — let us show you how eMenuCHOICE can be the perfect solution for your senior living community. Get in touch to schedule your free demo.
