In the care home environment, food menus influence everything from the health and nutrition of residents to food service operations.
Consequently, improving the food menus used in the nursing or group home environment has the potential to enhance residents’ quality of life and simplify the entire food service process.
By following these three simple steps, you can improve the quality of your food menus and save money at the same time.
Adopt Resident-Centered Assisted Living Food Menus
Too often, we design assisted living or nursing home food menus around nutrition and regulatory guidelines. Although this focus is important for meeting the nutritional requirements of residents, it does little to ensure their enjoyment.
In fact, it does little to ensure their consumption of meals. Consequently, you may have to provide supplementation or additional snacks to ensure sufficient calorie and nutritional intake.
When you shift individual recipe and menu focus to consider the cultural orientation and food interests of your residents, you minimize this problem. As a result, you can dramatically reduce waste and cut costs in purchasing and staffing requirements.
Consult a Dietitian for Recipe and Food Menu Design
In nursing homes and assisted living, food menus must meet all regulatory and dietary requirements. In addition, you must be able to incorporate doctors’ orders, consistency adaptation and allergy considerations.
If your staff is not planning menus well in advance, you run the risk of sacrificing one or more of these crucial components. This inevitably results in rejected or unservable meals, waste and more cost overruns.
By having your individual recipes and menus preapproved by a dietitian, you can ensure that nutritional values are upheld and have the opportunity to plan and purchase well in advance.
Improve Food Menu Planning and Organization
As you can see, poor planning is the most influential factor in assisted living food and staffing cost overruns. You can overcome this challenge easily by adopting a comprehensive assisted living menu planning system.
The Grove Menus menu planning system was designed to address the very problems that plague nursing homes, group homes and assisted living facilities.
Each of our recipes has been extensively field-tested and dietitian approved for taste, appeal and nutritional value. Our automated system allows you to plan meals well in advance, helping food service staff in ordering and purchasing. Pick, pull and prep lists make preparation a breeze.
The money you save in food waste and staffing costs can be significant, as our current clients can tell you. At the same time, you can improve the quality and appeal of your recipes, increasing resident quality of life.
Contact Grove Menus today for more information about our comprehensive menu planning program. You will be amazed at how easy it is, when using our simple and cost-effective system, to improve your assisted living food menus.