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 I was doing. Training and development to me should achieve that for each one of our employees.
Along with that, what we find very often is it requires a highly customized approach again. Everyone has TikTok videos, training online, AI platforms, and all that is great, but adding someone to go shoulder to shoulder with you completely changes the world for someone.
I remembered when I was a first-time manager coming out of hotel restaurant school, I realized pretty quickly within the first week, I must not have learned anything at all in college because I sure did not know what to do every day running this small restaurant that the company had given me. I used to sometimes cry on the bus going into the city to work and usually fall asleep on the bus going home, I was so tired. I had a manager in that same city adopt me and take me under his wing.
I would call him almost every day and he would just coach me through things. He wasn’t my manager, he was actually a friend from the same school just a couple years older than me. I remember that we talked every day that first year. What I love about Strategic Dining Services is we have folks like that. It’s like the ultimate phone-a-friend type of partnership where when you’re in a standalone community, you may be the main leader of food service. Your executive director, your hospitality team, they may not have any sort of culinary background.
Strategic Dining Services comes along and does the training and development for the management, the entire kitchen, the wait staff, wherever it’s appropriate, wherever each community, again, customizes the need. They also sit down with the executive director, the leader on site of the entire community, who really bears ultimate responsibility for what we all put out every day.
They sit with both of those parties and say, here are the priorities for the next month, here are all the tools that I’ve brought and trained for my visit, and here’s exactly what you should be looking for and inspecting and expecting to see if the performance is happening and going well. We take it bite-by-bite, step-by-step, and really build alongside the culinary team in the kitchen, but also with the leadership for the whole community.
It sounds like there’s a lot of support along the way through that entire ecosystem, which is really great to hear.
Absolutely, because there may be other people crying on their drive to work.
Exactly. We don’t want that. Especially in our culinary teams. When you’re thinking about, I know you touched on some of the operational impacts that the DineOS system has had for some operators, just with the rollout, do you want to talk about some of the other immediate impacts and some of the long-term benefits as an operator really thinks about strengthening their systems with your platform?
Yes, definitely. There’s standard tech platforms and the coming alongside, but a couple things we’ve also been able to bring to our clients with strategic dining is an entire purchasing platform. You mentioned Foodbuy, that’s the country’s largest GPO. We’re able now with the integration of Compass supporting SDS, to really bring all the power of the largest GPO in the country. With that, and we also bring STISM standards and so on, we’re typically able to fairly quickly bring our clients’ savings and expenses 3% to 5%. That may not seem like a huge amount, but I just last week got the latest inflation reports, and they’re still at 4%.
Thank God they’re not at 10% and 12% like they were a year or two ago. 4, but 4% is still a lot of money. We can’t allow the inflation of our costs in running dining, or really any inflation in the community, to outpace what our residents can pay. They have a pretty set income level. I think the speakers right before me talked about we’re not a restaurant, we can’t take things up 15%, 20%, 40% when we need to. Things are fairly constrained in senior living. Anywhere we can bring efficiency systems and then the training to really use them well, we can bring full circle support.
For a leader with many communities spread over a large geographic area, what’s some advice you would share just in thinking about how to best manage a wide area?
What we’re finding right now in the industry is more and more communities are needing to affiliate. Either through affiliation or full purchases, you’re seeing systems grow in places that perhaps systems didn’t used to grow. Then you have systems who have really meaningfully built an amazing system together. What we see in systems is that they’re finding a lot of great value for them through strategic dining. Places like Tutera, Ohio Living, Five Star.
What we’re unable to bring by bringing systems and coaching to every community, then we’re able to pull all the data and be able to give the senior executives in a system new data to make decisions. A couple weeks ago I was working on a project and I was like, give me the data, how much use is happening, which areas of the country are performing well or perhaps underperforming on the expectations.
I sat in on a review of the business with our senior clients at Five Star and we were able to show district by district where things were going well, where things needed to improve, which of the 15 measurables that we agree on with them are thriving and really being accepted by teams, which ones are struggled. That lets us help the leaders of a system, give them data systems and processes so that everyone can make wise decisions so that the system really flourishes because you’re serving hundreds if not thousands of older adults in those systems. You have scale and we want to make sure we do scale exceptionally well.
That scaling we know can come with some headaches.
It’s hard because oftentimes the senior culinary leader has come up through the system, through the kitchens, but I know when I first did a job that went from me running my own restaurant and kitchen to trying to supervise 20, that is a huge career leap. We recognize that I think throughout the business in all of our career paths that’s happened, but how can you bring system and support to help with that? That’s really where we find a great solution with SDS.
CCL Hospitality Group leads in culinary and support services nationwide, with Morrison Living, Unidine, Coreworks, and The Hub. They offer world-class hospitality infrastructure, talent, and innovation, shaping future leaders with a service culture focused on community living excellence. To learn more, visit: https://www.ccl-hg.com/.
