How to Use Dining Room Data to Staff Smarter and Optimize Your Senior Living Operations

A decade ago, a remarkably prescient study by Argentum found that dining staff would be among the most pressing hiring needs in senior living through 2025. Well, now we’ve arrived, and current research bears out that 2015 prediction. The senior living dining experience is more important than ever, but staffing is an ongoing challenge. High turnover rates, a reliance on part-time employees, a lack of engagement, and soaring inflation are all contributing factors that have exacerbated the problem.

However, the last 10 years have brought more than a doom and gloom prophecy — they’ve also brought enormous advances in technology. In 2025, our analytical capabilities have increased substantially, making it easier than ever to collect, monitor, and utilize data to make more informed decisions. 

This is good news for senior dining, as it allows senior living communities to leverage the data they create to manage a complex system of meal times, menu planning, dining room staffing, and resident satisfaction. Even better, data-driven menu planning helps improve efficiency throughout the entire community, cutting costs, reducing waste, and making mealtime something both residents and employees can look forward to.

Here, we’ll take a closer look at the data points you should be tracking to improve your senior living dining services and uncover how you can make the right choices right now without waiting another 10 years to see if your predictions were right.

The Key Dining Room Data Points Senior Living Communities Need

There is no single data point that will give you a total picture of your senior dining program. To optimize your dining services and increase efficiency, you need to consider several different data sources, including the following:

Dining Traffic Volume and Peak Times

You can't effectively staff your food service team without knowing when to increase assistance and when to reduce it. If you keep the same number of employees on every shift, you may quickly find that you’re overstaffed at slow times and seriously understaffed during your rush times. This can create a lot of waste when employees are waiting for something to do, or it can create a lot of stress when you’re stretched too thin.

Fortunately, you can use data from your point-of-sale (POS) system to track your busy times and get a clear understanding of when you need to bump up staff and when you can go lighter and save. With a POS system designed exclusively for senior living dining like eMenuCHOICE, you can run a Velocity Report that will help managers find patterns and trends. Then, you can forecast peak times and be sure you’re appropriately staffed.

Resident Preferences and Dining Experience

Of course, your residents want delicious meals they love and impeccable dining service, and your care staff wants them to have healthy dining options that meet their dietary needs. On top of this, you can factor in cultural needs, specialized diets, and personal preferences, and you may end up feeling that you’re way over your head. Offering the right dining solutions can be a challenge, but dining satisfaction is a huge part of the resident experience. 

When you use your dining data to uncover real resident preferences, you can start to make informed decisions that will help you create new efficiencies and slash food waste. Using food preference data to create optimized menu plans will also reduce some of the burden on staff. You can create meal prep schedules more easily and predict which dishes will be popular. This way, you’ll be prepared with the right amount of staff, service, and ingredients when needed.

Table Turnover Rate

How long do residents linger over dinner? Do they stay and chat over coffee in the morning, or do they rush off to a planned activity? Understanding table turnover in your dining room or other dining venues will help your staff appropriately and ensure tables are cleared and prepped for incoming residents in a flash. Analyzing and understanding your table turnover rate will give you a clear picture of when you need additional staff and when you need to work on quicker turnover times. 

Ways to Use Senior Living Dining Data to Optimize Staffing

So, now that you have all this data, what do you actually do with it? We can help you figure that out:

Adjusting Staff Schedules to Match Peak Volume

Your first action step is to choose the best POS system for senior living. We designed eMenuCHOICE specifically for senior dining because that’s what we do best. A generic restaurant POS may be “good enough,” but it isn’t equipped to handle the specific needs of a senior living or assisted living community. Use eMenuCHOICE POS to run the Velocity Report on a regular basis, and over a few days or weeks, you’ll begin to see emerging trends. Once you know your peak times, you can schedule staff accordingly and adjust shifts so you have more coverage when you need it and less when you don’t.

Matching Culinary Team Skills to Service Needs

Using the data you collect on resident preferences and what they’re actually consuming, you can start to staff based on skills and needs. For example, you might find that you have multiple residents on a heart-healthy diet that should be closely managed. You also learn that most of them skip breakfast but eat lunch and dinner in the main dining room. You can use this data to schedule a nutritionist or dietitian at times when they’re most likely to be needed. As another example, if you learn from your data that you have a large number of residents who eat Indian food due to their cultural background or personal preference, you can then use that to help plan and prep meals with authentic, fresh ingredients. Perhaps you have a dining employee with expertise in preparing Indian cuisine. They can then be scheduled for mealtimes when those dishes will be prepared or utilized to teach cooking classes to residents to increase engagement.

Improving Resident Service with Well-Timed Staffing

Residents who are kept waiting for their meals are going to end up dissatisfied. Even worse, some of them may have dietary restrictions or needs that require them to eat in a more timely manner. Analyzing your data and checking on table turnover rates, peak times, and more will help you plan staff scheduling accordingly. That way, you’ll never be overstaffed or understaffed, and you can ensure that residents can eat when they need or want to at a comfortable pace.

Other Ways Dining Room Data Can Be Used

Data is a powerful tool, and your senior living community is cranking it out on a daily basis. Once you understand how to harness it and use it, you can put it to work for much more than staffing. Use your dining service data to:

• Track and bill guest and staff meals so you aren’t losing potential revenue
• Cut back on food waste by knowing food preferences and resident eating habits
• Forecast meal demand for popular dishes and mealtimes so you’re always prepared
• Entice prospective residents by showing them example menus with popular meal choices
• Expand dining options by understanding the demand for additional dining venues like bistro spaces or cafes
• Create efficiency and sustainability by sourcing local, in-season ingredients for popular meals from farmers' markets or other small sellers
• Improve the level of care for residents by using data to create menus that are tailored to their dietary needs
• Encourage socialization at the right times by understanding turnover rates and peak times

How to Get Started with eMenuCHOICE

The data is there — now all you need to do is make it work for you. Your senior living, independent living, or retirement communities could benefit greatly from dining analytics, and eMenuCHOICE can be your partner in doing it right. We have a full range of solutions from POS to menu planning that will help you improve efficiency, staff appropriately, and ensure your residents are healthy, fed, and satisfied. When you’re ready to get started, we’re ready for you. Schedule a meeting with us, and we’ll get started building a custom plan just for you.