HEALTHTAC F&B 2024 Panel: Value Added Experiences to Increase Trust and Satisfaction, Part 1
By Jim Nelson | January 24, 2025
MIAMI, FL — HEALTHTAC recently held its annual boutique food & beverage event in conjunction with its sister company, Senior Living News. Many leaders of culinary departments from all over the country converged on this city for two days and three nights to network, share best practices, learn, and most of all, enjoy themselves.
The panelists for our final panel were Norine Mulry from Rose Villa Senior Living; Brian Gallo from Priority Life Care; and Fernanda Caro of Erickson Senior Living; James Hoevertsz, Brookdale Senior Living’s senior divisional director of dining services west division, moderated the panel. (Read about our other panels here.)
“We wanted to talk about some of the value-added experiences, and what exactly that means,” Hoevertsz began. “I want to identify some things and I want you to prepare your mind for what we’re going to talk about, because there’s a lot to learn. The objective of our panel is to spur innovation among us so that you can create that value.”
With the help of an audience member, Hoevertsz defined “adding value” as giving someone an experience that they didn’t realize they were going to have.
“We can do that every day,” Hoevertsz said of adding value, “but the truth is, it doesn’t happen every day because sometimes we’re just trying to survive out there. There’s a couple of things that I want to mention when we’re talking about adding value: First of all, you need to know what the residents want, and we need to find a way to find that out. We need to find what kind of value we’re going to add to that.”
“We also want to identify two things throughout our presentation,” Hoevertsz added. “One of them is participation, and the other one is engagement. When we create experiences, are your residents participating, or are they engaged in what you’re doing?
“I’ve been part of big companies [where] we’ve built spectacular CCRCs,” Hoevertsz continued. “We have four restaurants, I have Brookdale bars, I treat it like a resort. But the truth is, it’s just a building. Even that won’t justify someone writing you a check for $12,000 a month and giving you $1.5 million for entry fee. I can’t even imagine somebody making a check and saying, ‘That should cover it.’ There’s a lot that $12,000 can cover, and for us it’s about creating experiences that have value and are memorable.
“One of the things that is very important to us,” Hoevertsz then wondered aloud, “is how do we find out if what we’re doing is what the residents want? Tell us a little bit, Brian, about what [Priority Life Care does]. What matrix do you use to find out if what you’re doing is what the residents want?”
“With Priority Life Care, when I came on a couple of years ago,” Gallo offered, “we took our engagement platform and expanded the dining into dining. We wanted as much information about our residents, about the dining experience, as we could get, and we took that and customized it into events. What I put on my teams is, ‘I want four events, and I want one surprise family event.’ The biggest load time for residents, too, is what? The weekends, right? So, on the weekends we have football parties. We’re in the private setting area, we have a buffet line, our chefs are there. And what’s nice is our directors want to work the weekends now, because they get to do what they would normally do and be with our residents. Do something fun, do something creative, and make it fun for our residents. On the flip side, if you don’t go to that, our dining room is set up to be an experience. We take that information, we train our servers, ‘Relate to your resident. You know all about them, relate to them.’
“What’s nice is we give back on that app for our residents to tell us how we’re doing,” Gallo went on, “and we don’t hide that information. Our chefs know exactly what [the residents are] saying right after the meal. And what does that do? We’re proactively addressing whether we’ve hit those expectations. Did we fail Ms. Smith? Well, how do we make Ms. Smith’s experience that much better? We have information resources in front of us, so we have dived into that very heavily because the more information we have, the more quality life we give back. And what we’re doing now through the resident apps, is we’re enhancing the in-room experience for the residents, too.
“So really,” Gallo continued, “through technology we’ve taken that information, and we’ve hit those expectation marks. And if we don’t, we know instantly, and we know we’ve got to get better.”
“Fernanda is a certified executive chef by the American Culinary Federation,” Hoevertsz pivoted, “and she did something really special that I want her to share with you.”
“We just opened a new restaurant this year,” Caro replied. “I think we all come from the old scoop and serve, and we’re trying to do something a little better for our residents, right? So, given my experience, I try to just implement some of the things that I had learned throughout my career. I’m from a different country so I think it was really cool that we could use our special events to educate the residents, and they want to know about other cultures. We have about 1,100 residents from independent living, and our staff comes from everywhere — from Nigeria, from all of South America — we have people speaking a bunch of different languages, and not just in dining, but in different departments, we do activities that promote that cultural diversity. So, last year, November 1, there’s a Mexican tradition called Day of the Dead, which is our way of celebrating the people who are not with us anymore. We did that event for the first time last year, and it was very well received. The residents didn’t know about it, but it was all traditional food, everything was homemade. We put up posters explaining the history of the actual tradition, and [the residents] were very happy. We set up a photo booth as well, with a bunch of skulls. We made chocolate skulls so they could get some at the end of the night [Editor’s note: skulls, especially sugar skulls, are a central part of the Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos in Spanish) celebration; they symbolize death and rebirth]. Now the [residents] are asking for other countries and other events. We also did a Japanese night — we made sushi from scratch. So, it’s something really fun, not just for the residents, but for our staff. Everyone is learning. Everyone does something different than what we usually do, and we try to think outside of the box.”
“Many years ago, I had a resident that actually changed my life,” Hoevertsz explained. “I call her Dorothy because we probably all have one in our communities. She just paid about a $1.5 million entry fee, and it was probably about the $12,000 I was talking about; she’s living in this beautiful community, and you assume that she’s happy. Dorothy told me on Christmas day that she wanted to die. And I’m like, ‘What? Look at all we have here.’ She told me she missed her husband. It hit me that [even with] all the stuff that we do, sometimes we’re missing the mark. Make sure that you don’t miss the mark. We have an opportunity every day to hit it, so we need to pay attention to that.”
In part 2 of this article, the panelists will dive into ways in which they add value to simple things like watching football games and a community garden.
