
HEALTHTAC F&B 2024 Panel: Dining as a Marketing Tool/Catering as a Revenue Stream
By Jim Nelson | January 16, 2025
MIAMI, FL — Sister companies HEALTHTAC and Senior Living News recently held our annual boutique food & beverage event in this city, just a few miles from the Atlantic shore. In attendance were leaders of senior living culinary departments of all sizes and from all over the nation.
One of our panels (click here to read about other panels) got into the split topic of utilizing dining departments for marketing and catering as a revenue stream. The panelists were Scott Finley, the culinary specialist from Primrose Retirement Communities; Christian Ramsey, the director of operations at The Kendal Corporation; and Aaron Dreilinger, the convivium director at Thrive Senior Living; Dreilinger also moderated the panel.
“How has food and beverage become part of your marketing image?” Dreilinger began the conversation with a question for Primrose’s Finley.
“Well, the program that we are rolling out is a long process,” said Finley. “Artisan dining basically is cook to order, restaurant style, from scratch whenever possible. We still have kitchens that have one item, one vegetable, one starch. That’s what you get. Maybe the resident gets a hot dog on the side once in a while. So, we’re converting our kitchens into line cooking, cook to order, and it’s served in the dining room. That’s quite a departure from what we’ve done in the past. And it’s an equipment thing, it’s a staffing thing, it’s a lot of things that have to change.”
“When potential residents and their families are looking at Primrose to live,” he continued, “artisan dining and cook to order from scratch is built into our marketing.”
Dreilinger turned to Kendal’s Ramsey next, his question alluding to an earlier chat between the two.
“We talked about California and [how they make their] own tofu and [everything needs to be] organic. How have you doubled down on, ‘This is F&B, this is how we want to get it in front of our marketing team’?”

“California [Enso Village] is a unique opportunity where we partner with Zen Center,” Ramsey answered. “They’re based out of San Francisco, they’re Buddhist in nature, so having this Quaker/Buddhist collaboration was very interesting, to say the least. But so much of it kind of meshed together in such a beautiful way. Some of the things they’ve said to us were, ‘Everything needs to be locally grown. Here in California, it needs to be organic.’ They even make their own tofu sometimes. They make everything in house. The chef there is amazing, and I have a lot of respect for him. Then across the country, we have other residents who say, ‘We want catering, we want to do big events, we want 1,000 people here.’ And we have a site that can accommodate that, and they can do big business.”
“At Thrive properties,” Dreilinger related, “I’m often marketing more towards an independent — we’re blended communities, half assisted and half independent — but the shiniest and most beautiful-for-marketing part of what we do is really the most independent and the fanciest food, the nicest china. I’m trying to get that in front of marketing all the time. And we have a bistro that almost all the properties have that showcases the fresh-baked cakes and muffins for the day. I want them in front of everybody, not on the menu, not on the special; you don’t live to 95 by eating six muffins for breakfast, but it’s nice to be offered once in a while.
Next, Dreilinger turned the conversation toward catering.
“You might be a high-end, off-premise caterer doing weddings, you might be dropping off metal pans of food that are already hot — it takes all shapes,” he prefaced. “We’re really talking about additional revenue that came in through food and beverage that may not be exactly in your dining room. What, if not catering, Scott, are you guys doing?”
“Catering in the traditional sense, especially off premise with equipment and setting up, Primrose hasn’t put a focus on due to the cost of labor and equipment,” Finley acknowledged. “We’ve chosen to instead invest those dollars into our residents and in our dining. We do catering in the sense that a vet group comes in in the morning for 10 or 15 people, there’s a local group who has a breakfast once a month, that type of thing.
“We do a lot of prospect lunches,” he continued. “We’ll have maybe a certain day of the week where our sales director has brought in five or six prospects, and we serve them lunch and they get a tour of the building, things like that.”
“Christian, you mentioned a couple properties that have large-scale catering, with high-revenue numbers,” Dreilinger said.
“Not every site at Kendal can perform those kind of things, but we do have a site, specifically our D.C. site, where they have done the gambit,” Ramsey responded. “They don’t do a lot of offsite — they’ll do a lot of drop-offs with local police departments, fire departments, they’ll do things for local sororities, fraternities, but onsite they’ve put up large tents for 200 people and they’ve done ice sculptures, they’ve done seven-course wine dinners for 100 people, you name it, they’ve done it. We have done weddings there, we have done birthday parties where we brought in DJs, where we brought in specialty furniture, and put up special decorations, balloons all over the place, you name it. Whatever the client wants, or the resident onsite, we will do it.
“Coming out of COVID,” he added, “they haven’t done as much as they [did] pre-COVID, because we’re still building back up that business, but pre-COVID there were years they were well into the six digits as far as revenue for catering. But to get to that point in any senior living facility, first, the daily operations need to run like a well-oiled machine, and then we can start to say, ‘What can we add on top of that?’ That’s revenue for the community.”
“That sounds like a full operation where you’re reaching out to the community for the catering,” Thrive’s Dreilinger furthered. “What does that operational process look like?”
“It’s usually all word of mouth,” Ramsey began. “We’ve had prospective residents come to a marketing event, for example, maybe they’ve come to our large-tent gatherings, or they come to a luncheon. We normally have a catering coordinator who’s over that. There is a contract, there is a catering menu, there are terms you have to agree to. There are rules you’ve got to put in place, and there’s some controls you have to put in place for the safety of the community.”

“[At Thrive] we have servers trained to be able to talk with families and visitors about what kind of additional event we can host,” Dreilinger offered. “We’re not off premises anywhere, but the staff is the first to hear, ‘Oh, did you know so and so is turning 99 next week? Their family would really like to do something.’ I encourage the servers to start listening to these things and talk to them, because that sells events, and they’re so meaningful and so wonderful when you get to do these. I was in the restaurants up the street for a long time, and you don’t get a lot of thank yous, but there’s something life changing about cooking dinner for someone’s 100th birthday; when you’re with their family and they’re so excited, it’s really meaningful. The revenue is great, but also, I think that’s contagious to your staff. They feel like they’re part of an event. It changes them a little.”
From the audience, Goodwin Living’s Brian Patterson asked the panel to talk about how they use their kitchens as a showroom.
“With Primrose, we don’t have dishwashers, dietary aids, cooks,” came Finley’s reply. “We hire, as much as possible, cooks with the understanding that they do dishes, they do floors, they cook, they take food out. So, we get our staff out in the dining room, serving food, they get to know the residents. Monthly, or more often, the dining director or the chef does a cooking demonstration. Where the dining director meets prospective families coming in [we provide] a prospect lunch, the chef comes out, and usually we serve exactly what we’re serving [the residents] — maybe the plates are a little nicer looking, and you’ve given a little extra care. So, our staff is always mingling with the residents, and particularly when there’s families there, we try and make sure we touch them too.”
“We do kitchen tours at all our sites,” Ramsey answered. “We invite the residents to come in any day, any time; as long as we’re not in heavy production and it’s orchestrated, we’ll walk you through the kitchen. I think it’s important that they see where the food is made and what we’re using.”
“The property we’re cutting the ribbon on now has an open kitchen with a glass aquarium wall across the whole kitchen, and you can see straight in,” said Dreilinger. “The first thing I did when the developer handed us the building was frost the glass. But working on the cruise ships, the legend of the kitchen tour is powerful; they talk about it, they feel special. So, I agree that there’s some power to the kitchen tour, although it’s not always an opportune moment to walk someone through the kitchen. It’s rarely an opportune moment, but if your staff knows that there’s going to be visitors, usually they’re prepared.”
Norine Mulry from Rose Villa Senior Living then queried Ramsey. “You mentioned you have a catering coordinator but are you adding staffing specifically for a catering quasi-department or are you making adjustments to your daily operations to siphon staff off to put on the event?”
“A little bit of both,” he conceded. “We are able to siphon off staff to do an event and not close anything down. Also, we do have a small group of per-diem employees who we can call in, but [with] per-diem employees, if you’re not constantly feeding them hours, sometimes they’re not as reliable. But we have a great relationship with the local high schools and colleges, so we’re developing that pipeline of people. You can always maximize your part-timers and see if they can take on extra hours.”
“For an outside group, do you allow tipping?” Mulry followed up.
“No, never,” Ramsey replied.
Dreilinger the moderator noted that he’d heard quite a bit of conversation about tipping throughout the course of the HEALTHTAC event, and how tipping plays into the industry’s efforts to attract a more professional staff that are used to getting tips.
“One thing we’ve done,” Ramsey said, “is when we’ve had conversations with catering event hosts, we’ve said, ‘You can write a check to the employee fund towards an end-of-the-year bonus for all the staff.’”
He went on to conclude that tipping is against their values, and that they’re also being mindful of their residents when outside guests are dining in a Kendal venue.
“It’s a personal preference for us. If you’ve got a guest sitting right next to a resident, and the guest leaves a $20 bill, the resident may feel inclined to do the same. And we just don’t want that atmosphere in our communities.”