HEALTHTAC F&B 2024 Panel: Value Added Experiences to Increase Trust and Satisfaction, Part 2
By Jim Nelson | January 27, 2025
MIAMI, FL — Our sister company, HEALTHTAC, recently produced its annual boutique food & beverage event, where leaders of culinary departments from senior living organizations nationwide met in this city for two days and three nights to network, share best practices, learn, and have fun.
James Hoevertsz, Brookdale Senior Living’s senior divisional director of dining services west division, moderated a panel on adding value to the resident experience; he was joined onstage by panelists Brian Gallo from Priority Life Care; Fernanda Caro of Erickson Senior Living; and Norine Mulry from Rose Villa Senior Living.
In part 1 of this article, we learned about surprise family events and making sure we don’t miss the mark when it comes to what our residents want.
“Norine has what most of us have: a garden,” Hoevertsz continued, “but they do something different that I thought was pretty cool.”
“We’re a single-site CCRC in Portland, Oregon,” replied Mulry from Rose Villa Senior Living, “and sustainability is a core component of our community; the residents care very much about recycling, composting, and our onsite garden, as you mentioned. We have a two-acre garden with about 90 plots, and of those, a dozen plots are committed to growing food for our kitchens. It’s a team of resident volunteers, actually, that manage those plots. They grow tomatoes, zucchini, fresh herbs, fresh berries, rhubarb, and it’s a real partnership with our kitchen team and our executive chef and our sous chefs to meet with them to discuss, ‘What kind of tomatoes are we going to grow this year? What do we use in the kitchen that the residents are able to manage?’ I think that we’re able to accomplish a couple of things: There’s that direct contact that our kitchen team has with this core group of resident volunteers. It gets the residents excited to have that behind-the-scenes knowledge, and it gets our kitchen staff excited too, to talk about, ‘What do we want them to grow?’ It’s a conversation. It ripples out to our whole community, though, because particularly during the summer months, we are able to integrate quite a bit of that produce into our menus. We will advertise it as ‘RV Garden Fresh Produce.’ It might be the daily vegetable that day, we might be able to have the servers say, table side, ‘I can guarantee you every cherry tomato in that salad is from our garden. It’s organic, it’s sustainably grown, and it’s about as farm-to-table as you can get.’ There’s obviously a huge benefit on the kitchen side, but for the resident experience, there’s a sense of ownership, and there’s a sense of pride when they can walk into the dining room with their family and look at the baking case and say, ‘I grew the rhubarb that is in that pie.’”
“I’m still thinking about Brian’s football thing that he was talking about,” Hoevertsz said next. “Let’s talk about that for a moment, and how will we add value to something like that? Say [it’s a] normal Sunday lunch or brunch, whatever you’re doing with football, maybe we have all the servers in jerseys — bring your favorite team jersey. Maybe you want to do a square; it’s not about money, but we can do some kind of prize and have people pick a square so [they] are engaged. I’m going to give you some of my metrics to create one of those added-value experiences. The first thing is, set the scene, and this applies to venues, because I know that there’s been a big boom in senior living of adding venues. If you want to add value to that, there’s a few things that I personally recommend: the first thing you’ve got to do is set the scene. First impressions count. If you’re going to have the football thing, if you’re going to have the garden thing, make everybody look like they are into that. So, your servers are in football gear, people in the garden have maybe some kind of apron. That’s the first impression, part of this added value thing. And there has to be an interactive element to it. You cannot skip exceptional service. If you don’t have a trained staff, spend the [time to train them]; you have to provide good service, and they need to be aware of what that is. I tell everybody, ‘It’s storytelling. You’ve got to make sure that you give the story and a value to that experience.’ And the last one is the element of surprise. We want to have some element of surprise in there, something that they weren’t expecting.
“We need to do a better job, not only engaging the residents, but also our administrators and our associates, our employees,” Hoevertsz added. “We need to include our employees when we are adding value experiences, and they need to understand their place in that experience.”
Hoevertsz then asked Gallo about other experiences his team uses to add value.
“I challenge [the staff to] get out of the kitchen, bring the kitchen to the residents,” was Gallo’s response. “When we get older, what starts to go? Our taste a little bit, right? But what do we eat with first? Our eyes, our ears, right? So, we bring the sizzle. A lot of demonstration-based stuff, a lot of plate measurements, and really have that eye pinned because when you go out and you see a [server with a] plate walk past you, and it looks good, you’re like, ‘Hey, what’s that?’ That’s how we engage our residents in the dining room. We display, we have a lot of fun. Our staff loves it because who’s talking to us while we’re cooking? Our residents, and they’re a part of the experience. And I think that Norine’s point is that what do our residents search for? They want purpose. They want to be included. They don’t pay $12,000 a month to sit on the sidelines. Make them part of the experience. That’s what we do at Priority Life Care: challenge our current directors and our soon-to-be oncoming ones [to] build purpose. Bring the kitchen to your residents. Showcase your skills, get your staff involved because it’s the fun part. If we’re having fun in the building, so are our residents. And if our residents are having fun, who are they telling? Their family. And what’s that expectation when family comes in? We’re having fun. So, it really has been a great thing for us, and we’ve reduced turnover because they build that relationship with the residents. That is the value our employees get from working in our industry. It’s not the dollars, it’s the family, it’s the camaraderie.”
“Norine, what else do you guys do at Rose Villa?” Hoevertsz asked.
“I’ll go back to our garden example,” Mulry answered. “One way that we’ll turn that experience into an event is during the summer months every Tuesday there is a resident market, like a micro farmers market. They sell food to each other, and then it supports our foundation. In the past what we’ve done is have our executive chef [at an] eight-foot table [with] an induction burner — it doesn’t need to be anything complicated — and she’ll do a garden demo. You can parlay that into a feature on your menu that night; maybe it’s a small-plate feature that you’re just doing the one night only. It’s not a huge time commitment, and it’s a draw for the residents to come and have that experience. We’ve partnered with residents, too. I’m sure a lot of you have master gardeners that live where you’re working, so [if you do] a tomato tasting they can talk about the different varieties of tomato; bring your leadership team into it to pass out the samples, and tell your sales and marketing team, because they would like to know so they can put it on your social media platforms. Those are some ways that we can really highlight the thing that makes our community unique.”
“Adding value is not necessarily adding money,” said Hoevertsz in wrapping up this panel. “It’s about adding the big little things. If you want your residents to be interested, you have to be interesting.”
[Read about all of our panels here]
