HEALTHTAC F&B 2024 Panel: Technology in Dining

By Jim Nelson | December 19, 2024

MIAMI, FL — Recently in this city, sister companies HEALTHTAC and Senior Living News held their annual boutique team building/networking/learning food & beverage event, where we were joined by operators and suppliers from as far away as Israel.

This article puts a spotlight on our first panel at the event (click here to read about other panels), which covered some of the technology that’s making life a little easier/better in dining rooms and kitchens. The panelists were Sam Currie, director of culinary services at The Springs Living; Michael Davis, director of culinary operations at New Perspective Senior Living; and Josh Ordorff, Lifespark Senior Living’s culinary operations manager.

As the moderator, I began by asking each of the panelists which technology has them most excited.

“Robotics, I think,” said Currie. “We’ve just dabbled in it a little bit, but definitely robotics as we move forward.”

“It’s our recipe system,” Davis offered. “There’s so many things we can do with it and control it right on the line with our folks.”

“With us, moving our temp logs and other things to iPads and such,” was Ordorff’s reply, “and moving away from paper.”

And how has technology impacted their jobs most dramatically in recent years?

“The pace has stepped up,” Ordorff said. “The servers are more efficient. Having the tablet table side, rather than running that piece of paper back and forth, printing it right back to the kitchen, is life changing.”

“Before our recipe system,” Davis elaborated, “the quantities were 25, 50, 75, but if you have a community with 66 or 68, now you can plug that exact number into this recipe system, and it’ll quantify everything for you. You can also put step-by-step photos and videos attached to recipes, so that if you have labor issues, or you don’t have a culinary service director, or the skill level isn’t so high, now you can look in these recipes and still maintain the standards of your products, whether you’re in the building or not. It’s also nice because you can create these videos internally with your own people. It’s just a really good program.”

“The introduction of some robotics allowed us to change the dynamics in the dining room by letting the robots do some of the menial tasks, keeping our servers on the floor and engaged with residents,” Currie told the room. “It has actually improved our touch points with our residents. I think that’s been really impactful. We don’t use robotics everywhere, but in the places where we have it’s been very impactful.”

At New Perspective they’re using QR codes to get in-the-moment feedback from residents. When I asked Davis about that, he responded by showing the room some tabletop tents they’re using, each with a QR code on it.

“These sit on our tabletops in our dining rooms, and this allows our residents to give raw feedback right away,” he said. “We want to get the raw evidence right back from them so that we know where we need to focus our training. It has really been working. My boss is on this constantly. We have lots of data now to understand where we need to work, so it’s not something to be afraid of. We want to enhance our culinary departments as much as possible.”

Next, Ordorff discussed a POS app that Lifespark uses that helps reduce trips from the kitchen to the table.

“It just streamlines the whole process,” he mentioned. “Not only is it efficient, but this system works with the nursing side. So, for allergies or any or preferences as well, they speak to each other, so there’s no question. Especially for our memory care, our most vulnerable adults, the tickets, name, allergies, and there’s no question — they just get the right food.

“They see the daily menus,” Ordorff added regarding what the staff sees on the app, “the picture of the resident, the resident’s name, room number, all that stuff.”

So how much better is life in the dining departments thanks to these tech solutions?

“We continue to grow with this,” Davis explained. “If you have a gluten-free resident and you’re serving a sandwich or burger with bread, you can actually highlight those meals so that the server can’t order those meals. Residents can have what they want, but I’ll go get a nurse and they can give it to them. Whatever those dietary needs say inside that POS, I’m following that. Those are doctor orders. It depends on your organization, but it really helps with your younger front-of-the-house team, too, usually they’re 15-, 16-, 17-year-olds, this is their first job, so they can identify this information, raise questions, go back to the culinary service director, the chef, or what have you, and then educate themselves on some of those dietary needs labeled inside of the POS.”

“Like Michael said, our younger staff have it at their fingertips,” Ordorff said. “Whether it’s the menu, the special diets, it minimizes the questions that they have. Obviously, they still have some questions, but it minimizes the problems and just keeps the flow going.”

“And also, we don’t want to break the bank and break our budgets, which are very important,” Davis continued. “Inside of the administrative part of the POS there’s PAR levels. We’re running a five-week cycle — we ran it for five weeks and it’s going to run again, so now we can go back and understand how much of each item to make because of what we sold five weeks ago. All of that information is there. I think that’s just as important as the dietary information.”

With The Springs Living using robots in its dining rooms, I asked Currie what they do exactly and how much they cost.

“We wanted to improve two things,” he replied. “One was the quality of the food leaving the kitchen line, and getting it out faster, because food was sitting in the windows too long. And number two, we wanted to keep the staff on the floor engaged with the residents. So, we did some Six Sigma analysis of how we were spending our time and determined that there were a lot of nonvalue-add elements of labor that don’t contribute to the resident experience at all. One of them was moving food from the kitchen to the dining room, and the second was moving dirty dishes back to the dish room. Think of it as a truck that’s hauling apples one way and wheat back the other way. The robot takes the food; the cook can load the robot and hit a button, and it would come to a dining room; we might have four stations that it would go to — it doesn’t go to a table. The server completes that last mile, so to speak, so there’s still that connection with the resident. It was not to save money, it was to improve quality. We found that we were able to reduce our delivery times, especially at breakfast time, almost 30 percent; the food was leaving the window 30 percent faster because we have robots that were continually going rather than waiting for a server to come back and pick up food. We did get feedback from our residents that they appreciated that the servers were in the dining room, connecting with them, attending to their needs.

“It doesn’t work in every community,” Currie continued. “We have 20 communities, and it works well in nine of them, currently. Not every community is physically built for it. There are some obstacles that you have to deal with, but in the places where it does work, it has a big impact.

“Financially, we don’t purchase our robots,” he finished. “We lease them. I would not recommend purchasing a robot. Like all technology, it’s changing continuously — let them handle that. Depending on how many robots you have in a community, it can run between $600 a month and $1,000 a month per robot. It sounds like a lot, but we’re in Oregon — high minimum wage, so we’re paying our servers anywhere between $16 and $20 an hour, plus taxes and benefits. Using $20 an hour as that average, you only have to deploy the robot 30 hours a month to pay for a server.”

And had they reduced labor costs at The Springs Living?

“That wasn’t our intention, originally, but we were able to do that,” he acknowledged. “Especially during breakfast time, a more spread-out meal period and we have less staff on at that point. Typically, it would take three servers in some of our larger communities to execute breakfast service in the dining room, and we were able to reduce that to two servers. So, the ROI on it is actually quite low. You’re paying a robot basically between $4 and $6 an hour, if you’re deploying them a couple hours a day. They always show up, they don’t talk back, and the performance appraisal is quite simple, so that’s a nice part of it as well.

“Our residents adore them,” Currie continued. “They name them. The robots can be programmed to play music, to sing, ‘Happy Birthday,’ to say, ‘Hello,’ so they’ve embraced them. We’re not promoting it as a replacement for staff, because it will never replace staff. We’re a people business, but how we can supplement staff? So, we started out [seeking to improve] quality for the residents, but it’s also improved quality for our staff. In our communities where we use them on a regular basis, the robots cover about 2.2–2.4 miles a day. That’s 2.2–2.4 miles that our staff doesn’t have to just be hauling things back and forth.”

“What is your training process for that?” Davis asked Currie. “I’m on the fence with the robot thing: I understand it, but I’ve seen a robot carrying food, and there were two servers walking alongside of it, so I feel like it’s defeating the purpose.”

“It definitely has to be a thoughtful process,” Currie responded to his fellow panelist. “You actually have to put the robot on the schedule, because otherwise the managers will schedule their FTEs and then add the robot, and you’re not accomplishing what you want to do. But it does have to be a thoughtful conversation with the staff in terms of how to use it and how they should be using their time, because they should be on the floor, not running back and forth. We have a server in one of our communities that embraced it from day one, and it’s like his partner. It’s not a large community — between 90 and 100 people at dinner time — and he can do the entire dinner service by himself with two robots.”

“How are you guys using AI [artificial intelligence] and BI [business intelligence] effectively in your communities?” Brian Gallo of Priority Life Care asked from the audience. “Are you using that in your communities to be beneficial to residents?”

“Resident satisfaction has improved a lot with the little bit of AI that we do with the residents,” Davis replied. “We were a little nervous about the QR code thing with them, in them using cell phones and things like that, but we also have it attached to our POS system so that our servers can help our residents go through the questionnaire and get these things answered. They feel better about what we’re doing; we’re getting things fixed for them a lot more quickly than we were in the past.”

“Michael, we have some POS systems, but only in our communities with bars and alcohol and things,” mentioned audience member Chuck Darany of American House Senior Living Communities. “Does your POS system do everything from ordering, prep logs, pull logs, everything?”

“Yeah, and [depending on] the organization that it’s from, you can always add different levels to your POS system,” Davis answered. “You can build PAR level, you can build inventory, you can get all these things with your POS system. It’s very useful. I have 11 communities right now that don’t have the POS system, and I was just working in them last week, and it is night and day from working in the communities that have it versus the ones that don’t.”

“Your five-week cycle is loaded in there, as well as recipes?” Darany asked.

“Five-week cycle is loaded in,” said Davis. “Our recipe system is not part of our POS system, but we can access it from the tablets.”