This article is sponsored by Strategic Dining Services. This article is based on a discussion with Kristin Thompson, senior vice president of client excellence at the CCL Hospitality Group. This discussion took place on May 17, 2024 during the SHN DISHED/Wellness Conference. The article below has been edited for length and clarity.
Senior Housing News: Strategic Dining Services has a goal to provide self-operated community dining management, culinary, and service staff with valuable resources, technologies, coaching, and hands-on support to enhance their skills and leadership abilities. This support, coupled with the power of the food by GPO purchasing resources and end-to-end culinary management ecosystem, drives efficiency, quality, and develops dining leaders into the community.
Kristin, what are some of the conversations that you’ve been having with senior living providers and what are some of the common business challenges and opportunities that they’re facing right now?
Kristin Thompson: In my role for CCL Hospitality Group, I cover the whole country and I have the great pleasure to talk to the nation’s leading senior living operators, typically the C-suite, executive directors, and hospitality leaders. It’s interesting because we all thought COVID was probably the worst thing we would ever go through in our lives in senior living, trying to make sure people stayed alive, flipping the entire food service world overnight, and usually every day as CMS and the health systems came out with new rules.
As I speak with clients, they often say coming out of COVID has been even harder. Most of my clients right now are faced with this interesting puzzle. There’s the puzzle of expenses, particularly nursing, interest rates going up on their loans for properties, particularly new properties and development. It’s an interesting puzzle of trying to return to financial viability so that they can stay alive to serve the residents that we all got in this business to serve. Then the flip side is we are all now finally shifting our attention again to be thinking about the resident of tomorrow, which is awfully fun. That’s where the technology comes in, the platforms, getting back to the really fun food service world that we all love.
It’s a puzzle, though, to try to contain expenses, find new revenue streams, so they’re having to really manage in a very new way. Yet all of us in dining, we know that dining is one of the top two reasons a resident chooses to move into a community. While you’re cost cutting and finding solutions to save your business, it’s also a time in senior living where you’ve got to be investing in huge ways. How do you manage those two things for a successful outcome?
I think one of the things of just the evolving operational environment, as you mentioned, is something that is really shaping how operators are thinking about dining and still balancing the personalization and choice-driven options for residents coming out of the pandemic as, like you said, get back to everything that made culinary an interesting part.
The fun stuff again.
Exactly, yes. What kinds of resources do community leaders share with you that they need the most when in those conversations that you’ve had? What are some of the things that they really need to help improve their operational success?
Our clients and really all of the communities need good cost-effective solutions. We need to make sure we are stewarding the resident’s investment and living in the community. I had a client say, “Kristin, for every single dime you spend, I need you to think of it as the resident’s money.” I thought that was so beautiful because when we think of everything that way and we think of people sometimes in a set income, in a set choice set financially, we’ve got to be making sure that every choice we make, stewards their time and money well.
Secondly, though, all the fun stuff again. Thinking about technology, thinking about costs and menu platforms, thinking about our new tech partnership with MealSuite. We call it DineOS. With that, we’ve been able to, and through Strategic Dining Services, offer that to clients. From beginning to the very end. That allows our clients to not have to purchase multiple platforms and systems. You simply install all the pieces of the DineOS platform, which fit your particular community. It’s high on customization, high on service.
Another thing we talked about is training and development. Strategic Dining Services, what we love about this team’s platform, is they come alongside and customize everything for your team, your kitchen, and your resident. We know how important customization is.
It sounds like that’s also translating to the operator environment as well. Do you want to talk about just some of the positives that you’re seeing just in general?
Yes, absolutely. Now, a lot of it is still in development. It’s very exciting and new for us across all of our companies. With DineOS, it will take things from recipes, ingredients, and seasonality. Strategic Dining particularly focuses on very fast menu turns, bringing a lot of seasonal and local ingredients in. You need a tech platform that can handle that amount of variety and change. It can’t be your apples every day type of recipes.
What we do is we plug that into all of the Compass Group resources, recipes, dietetics, all of our expertise now fades into the platform. Then the standard menu management, inventory, ordering, things like that. Then it also seamlessly integrates into all of the resident-facing platforms. Your tablets in the dining room, your app for ordering food. We may not feel that residents may be super great at that, but I’ve been endlessly surprised at what our residents can do.
Also, we just demoed the MealSuite pre-ordering app for a client a couple weeks ago who are focusing on providing meals for their employees. The idea of, say, you have an entire community that’s fairly spread out. Your employees perhaps get a 30-minute lunch break. Do they have to walk to your dining establishment, place an order, wait for 10 or 15 minutes? Now they have 7 minutes to eat and get back to care for the residents. That’s not a very relaxing, refreshing time to refresh and go serve again.
The idea is could you order your lunch ahead of time, which allows the kitchen to really seamlessly have it ready for you by the time you come. This creates an advantage for the hardworking staff throughout the senior living community with a great meal right on time. It means that the employees aren’t staying in the bistros in line with the residents. It also creates an advantage for the resident being able to easily use their venues.
It’s so cool to have a beginning-to-end platform and then to be able to plug in all of our resources from throughout the company to advantage all of our clients. Particularly, I think this is a very new program with depth for our strategic dining clients.
It sounds like you’re creating a platform that’s as nimble as operators have to be in today’s operating environment.
Exactly, because you customize every single piece of the way. If a community only needs one slice of that and has some wonderful platforms that perhaps surround it that they’ve already invested in, not a problem. It’s more about customizing, bringing our particularly self-operated clients, partnership, and performance.
One of the other aspects I want to touch on here is training and development because we know that essentially for a dining team and unfortunately some of the turnover issues that we see, especially on the dining and culinary side, it’s a never-ending challenge of being able to have the right training in place and the right career development in place for your staff, which feeds into retention as well.
What is your perspective on what works when it comes to training and development?
I might have a unique perspective because in some of my past careers, I’ve actually run sales training and operations training and things like that. Food is one of my biggest passions other than training. It’s about enabling people to be amazing in their work because we all have had those days where we’re like, I did the best job ever today. I served well, I learned, I loved what…
