SHN DISHED: Your Food. Your Story.

This article is sponsored by Gordon Food Service. This article is based on a Senior Housing News discussion with Eric Johnson, the Vice President of Culinary Services at Trilogy Health Services, Krista Zvoch, the Director of Nutrition at Storypoint Group, and Barb Minger, RD at Gordon Food Service. This discussion took place on May 17th, 2024 at the Your Food, Your Story session for the DISHED conference. The article below has been edited for length and clarity.

Barb Minger: Being a differentiator in the marketplace is very important in order to build census, and we know that competition is high. We have operators here to provide insight on branding their dining program.

Eric Johnson: I’ve been with Trilogy for about six years. I did not come from a senior living or healthcare background, and while that was challenging, it also gave me the opportunity to ask a lot of questions of things that I just didn’t know, and what we’ll go through here is a result of some of those questions.

Krista Zvoch: I’m a registered dietitian, and I’ve been with StoryPoint Group for going on four years now. Prior to this, I had no senior living experience except for working at PACE. Our company, when I started, had maybe 25 communities. We’re now at about 120, and projected growth is 200 by the end of the year. These four years have been a big learning curve for me as well, but, same as Eric here, I was driven to ask all the questions, and I still am.

Minger: Eric, tell us what branding a dining program means to you.

Johnson: Again, when I came into the organization, we already had a very solid reputation of quality food, and it was very helpful in the market. One thing that I noticed was the identity of the culinary team. First of all, we worked on eliminating the word “dietary” as much as we can from the lexicon. It seems small, but we wanted to elevate the employee experience. Trilogy is a very employee-first company. As I looked at the branding, so to speak, the first thing that we wanted to do was to help that team have a more clear identity.

We came up with a logo and the tagline of “Flavorful Living.” We don’t market this Culinary Services brand, but it was more really to help the culinary teams inside the buildings have an identity. Then, along with that, we developed a mission statement for our team.

We’re divided into 11 divisions in our footprint, so each of those has a divisional support, and so that support mission statement is our team’s mission to support our culinary employees. We went through a group exercise and asked four questions. “Who are we? Why are we here? What is most important to us? What is least important to us?” From all those conversations, you see the answers to the first three questions in our mission statement, and we took what was least important to us and set that to the side.

Minger: Krista, you’re in a different part of your journey at StoryPoint, so what is that?

Zvoch: When I came in four years ago, the company had done a lot of work identifying their culinary core standards. They led to a foundation of a very healthy diet. We’re now currently branding ourselves in regards to more of that nutrition philosophy. We are at the very early stages of this, so what branding has meant to us thus far is asking ourselves who we are, figuring out what kind of ingredients we want to use, what kind of recipes, what’s our menu mix in relation to food, nutrition, and wellness?

Our marketing team has our story at a certain level, and now we’re going to get an external brand for that, and our goal and our vision is that anyone can look at that brand and know, “Hey, that’s that StoryPoint group, and I know that they are deeply committed to the kind of menus they put out there in regards to the connection between food and health and wellness. They obsess over it.” That’s the point we want to get to and make that consistent amongst our communities.

Mission-wise, it’s not fully baked out, but ultimately it’s like we are using the most current research in nutrition science. We believe food is medicine. Our mission is to provide those options to our residents.

Minger: Has there been any encounter of resistance by your teams in this type of a branding program, trying to get that continuity? Is there any feedback from nursing, or other departments?

Johnson: We haven’t experienced any resistance, the intention of creating that mission statement was to clarify more clearly exactly what it is that the culinary team brings to the resident experience. Flavorful Balance is that you can’t force people to eat healthy and we certainly don’t want to do that, especially our residents, we don’t want to take any choices away.

What we did was we took a look at our overall cycle menu and evaluated it based on certain nutritional criteria that our clinical nutrition team knew.

Through a long process, we rewrote every recipe and the approach was to get rid of additives and preservatives that caused unpleasant symptoms.

Minger: Eric, can you talk about that as well?

Johnson: We have all of our campuses on board with this, 131 buildings in 5 states, you’ll see that term flavorful, but this is a clarification of the importance of how food should look for our period residents.

If you put yourself in the mind of a resident who’s on a pureed diet, they’re at a point where they’re not living in their own home, their choices of what they can do is less, their health has gotten to a point where they’re eating pureed food, so psychologically, they’re not in a good space, and when we put unrecognizable and unappetizing food in front of them, they’re much less likely to eat it. Long story short, we trained all of our chefs on some really strong techniques.

The term Flavorful Dignity really does keep it at the front of mind of the staff that we want to make sure that these residents are treated with as much dignity as possible. It’s pretty remarkable what happens when the emotional reaction that you get from a resident when they put something in front of them that’s recognizable, it will bring tears to your eyes.

Minger: Krista, same for you, in terms of your interdisciplinary team getting involved in this, and then where you’re at this point.

Zvoch: A couple of years ago, we defined our memory care dining approach. In doing that, I was really diving into that MIND diet research, and adding these recipes into our communities. We worked with our memory care coordinators to incorporate a new service style along with the recipes. The resident feedback was fantastic. Originally, the chefs didn’t believe the residents would like it.

We asked them to give it a shot and later did a survey with our marketing team, with 100% of our chefs, and they all said the vast majority of their residents loved the variety of vegetables, loved the different preparation techniques of the vegetables.So we pulled together a team. Eventually, we determined that many of the residents want to eat healthy, and they want it to be easy for them.

Minger: How do you both feel that this affects your census, and what feedback do you get from potential and current residents?

Johnson: We make sure our business development team can answer the questions and direct customers to the Flavorful Dignity or Balance program.

We audit our buildings each quarter with certain standards around Flavorful Balance and Flavorful Dignity so that we keep that consistency in the branding internally.

Zvoch: Our sales team is reaching out to me nonstop about when the marketing materials are going to be ready. I’m now included in all of their monthly calls to just help them navigate.

Minger: How are you both keeping the brand at the forefront of what you do with rising costs and budgets? Is this helping in any way?

Johnson: When you convert a kitchen from a lot of convenience foods to food in its natural state, the food’s less expensive. That’s helped us, over the past few years, to really mitigate the increase in costs. We’ve also put a high emphasis on working with Gordon Foods and HPS.

Zvoch: It’s a crucial part of the conversation, a lot of the culinary people in our neighborhoods immediately are like, “Oh, that’s going to cost more.” We’ve worked really hard with Gordon’s over the last year to lock down our order guide. We’re now partnering with DSSI in that respect, and tapping into GFS and HPS, our GPO, to identify reporting tools. That money that we’re saving, then, might be able to go into some cool projects that are up and coming.

Gordon Food Service has been delivering excellence in food for over 125 years. Known for their innovation and ease of use, Gordon Food Service provides the highest quality of ingredients to foodservice businesses. To learn more, visit https://gfs.com/en-us/.