Primrose Retirement Communities: In the Kitchen with Chef Scott Finley

By Jim Nelson | August 19, 2025

Scott Finley, C.E.C., Emeritus, and I essentially started this conversation when he was a panelist at a HEALTHTAC Food & Beverage event. In the course of continuing our chat in a conversation for the record, we discovered that for a chunk of the 1980s our worlds did that Venn diagram thing (with the middle occupied by southern California in general and Huntington Beach in particular). Who knows how many times we may have been on the Huntington Beach pier at the same time before finally meeting at HEALTHTAC in Finley’s home state of Florida.

Finley has been with Aberdeen, South Dakota-based Primrose Retirement Communities for nearly five years; since July of 2023 he’s been culinary specialist of the organization, which operates 34 communities with 11 memory care communities.

SENIOR LIVING NEWS: Where does the culinary department at Primrose fit into the whole picture of your residents’ lives?

SCOTT FINLEY: Our well-being model of care emphasizes helping others to maintain or even improve their life. In my case, it means a consistent dining experience that contributes to resident overall health in terms of their physical, emotional, and spiritual engagement. Part of this presentation that we made was our universal well-being concept based on prevention, developing, and maintaining oneself, particularly freedom of choice when it comes to dining connectedness; bringing them down to the dining room instead of having them in their rooms, trying making them part of a community, continued learning, emphasis on continued growth versus decline and their healthy longevity.

SLN: What was this presentation that you made?

SF: We had our annual executive directors’ conference in South Padre Island. Every executive director, all the owners, all the leaders in the company — about 70 people — were in one hotel for three days. And part of that this year was built on our presentation of well-being and dining, the holistic approach to it.

SLN: How do you go about marketing your culinary department to potential new residents?

SF: Our salespeople love it. We talk to family members, adult children, and explain to them that the dining experience for their parents or their loved one is based on choice. Their food might be an egg salad sandwich; we cook those eggs fresh. We have fresh bread brought in three times a week. We have lettuce from a local farmer, etc. So, they are really able to hang the dining hat, so to speak, on the concept of cook to order from scratch, minimizing processed foods.

SLN: Tell me about your Artisan Dining program at Primrose.

SF: The Artisan Dining program really is about choices for residents. They’re not getting the standard way of, “This is your option; today, you get a meat and a potato and sauce and vegetable and a dessert.” What if they don’t want all that? It goes in the garbage. Suppose they want something light, an egg salad sandwich, and they want fresh fruit. Or maybe they want the entrée today, but they don’t want the mashed potato; they want corn or a salad or cottage cheese. So, the Artisan Dining program is about choice, giving the residents a restaurant-style option from a menu.

SLN: What are the drawbacks to scratch cooking?

SF: Residents are accustomed to someone going in, getting their plate, bringing it right out; they’ve been sitting for a minute, and they’ve got their food. We have to break that paradigm because fresh food takes time. We have to coach the residents to say, “Why don’t we have cottage cheese in our starter menu?” We’ll bring you cottage cheese and your coffee, and you can have that while we’re preparing your grilled cheese. So, much like a restaurant, there’s no waiting line, but tickets get backed up. There are ways that we can streamline that to make it faster, but then it comes down to service, it comes down to cook times. We really have to work with the residents, so they understand what’s going on.

SLN: What about for those people who don’t have the time to sit down for a 30-, 40-minute meal? Have you got anything like a grab and go or whatever available to residents also?

SF: We don’t have grab-and-go units, but there’s always things on the menu that are faster than others. We don’t generally order ahead, but maybe Mary has a 12 o’clock doctor’s appointment, the bus is going to take her at 11:30 can she have a turkey sandwich ready at 11:15; things like that we can facilitate. And if one of our order takers came in and said, “Table 17 is in a hurry for the doctor, can someone get this for me right away?” One of the cooks or the chefs would stop what they’re doing and go bust it out.

SLN: You also had mentioned to me that you are freeing up your residents to be able to eat at any time of the day. If somebody is hungry at 2:00 a.m., can you accommodate them?

SF: There are limits. I think there’s a spirit of dining all day whenever they want is really within the time frame of when our restaurant is open — 7:00 in the morning to 6:30, 7:00 at night. They can come down and have an 11 o’clock breakfast, or maybe they skipped lunch, but at three o’clock they’re going to come down and have a cup of coffee and a grilled cheese. They can do that, but once we’re cleaned up at 7:00, 7:30, 8 o’clock at night, technically, we’re not serving but if someone came down at 2:00 in the morning there’d be a nurse there or a CNA, and we always have things in the lobby: whole fruit, granola bar, chips, cookies, something like that. That doesn’t happen a lot.

SLN: I’m one of these guys who loves to eat breakfast for lunch or dinner. I’ll get French toast, eggs and hash browns any time of the day.

SF: Then you should retire at Primrose.

SLN: You’ve got breakfast any time of the day for anybody?

SF: It’s not like we get inundated with pancakes at five o’clock, but the opportunity is there, and we do occasionally get an order for a cheese omelet. But, French toast and scrambled eggs, you could get that at dinner time. It adds more choices.

SLN: Well, it’s lunchtime here on the West Coast and all of a sudden, I’m thinking about French toast and eggs.

SF: If you’re ever in New Jersey, you have to have a pork roll, egg, and cheese sandwich on a hard roll. Pork roll is very New Jersey. You don’t get it anywhere else.