How Senior Living Operators Are Readying Dining Tech, Tastes For The Boomers

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Learn the latest dining trends during the Senior Housing News DISHED Sept. 3-4 in Atlanta, Georgia. DISHED brings together operators, owners, culinary staff and directors to discuss their strategies and challenges and brainstorm solutions to innovate their operations. To register for this event, visit the link here.
I recently had the opportunity to judge a senior living “Chef of the Year” competition. The event highlighted the rapid pace at which the industry is evolving culinary services.
The event, hosted by Life Care Services, brought together five of the operator’s community chefs at the Sysco headquarters in Houston to showcase their skills by cooking dishes such as ground turkey meatloaf, whole trout with couscous, marinated ahi tuna, spiced chickpeas and lentil salads.
It’s clear to anyone in senior living culinary services that dining trends are changing with the arrival of the baby boomers. Whereas yesterday’s senior living residents were content with batch cooking and cafeterias, the residents of today and tomorrow desire fresh fare made exactly to their preferences.
As Senior Housing News has written about for years, this is pushing senior living operators to be much more creative with their ingredients. At the same time, operators are becoming ever-more efficient with technology and other tools as food and staffing costs weigh on operating budgets.
The LCS Chef of the Year competition showed me that culinary creativity is alive and well among the operator’s chefs. But beyond that, I have seen outside-the-box thinking elsewhere in senior living dining services, exemplified by how operators like Harbor Retirement Associates (HRA) and others have raised the bar for the quality of the food they serve older adults living in their communities.
In this members-only SHN+ Update, I reflect on the recent event I attended, examine the changing trends of senior living dining and offer the following takeaways:
- Senior living kitchen tech and tools making an impact
- How food trends are translating into new senior living culinary strategies
- Where these trends are leading and what lies ahead in senior living dining
Modern tools and tech of senior living dining
One big trend I’ve noticed – both at the recent LCS food competition and in the wider senior living culinary world – is how operators are prioritizing efficiency in their kitchen tech and tools. While tools such as combination and conveyor ovens and blast chillers are not new to the industry, operators are leaning on them in 2025 to boost efficiency in their dining programs.
LCS has invested in new combination ovens across the communities it owns, LCS Vice President of Food and Beverage, John Pietrangelo told me. The ovens can be programmed to cook and maintain a dish’s temperature while staff perform other tasks. For example, staff can cook a roast overnight and have it ready to serve by the following morning.
LCS also equips communities with conveyor ovens that move food along a belt and can cook up to six different kinds of meals simultaneously.
Pietrangelo’s vision of the future includes automated ghost kitchens serving many different kinds of cuisines but operating out of one kitchen space. Residents would order via kiosks and get the food when they want it.
In the past few years, senior living operators have experimented with robots that can ferry food from the kitchen to tables. Now, they are seeking to bring automatons into the kitchen itself. Steve Lindsey, CEO of Garden Spot, told me the company is beginning to test using robots to flip burgers or bake pizzas with the goal of increasing consistency in cooking and making do with fewer staff.
Using tech that can cook food with less human intervention also raises the skill floor for senior living culinarians still learning their trade.
Separately, operators such as Harbor Retirement Associates also are implementing AI into their point of sales (POS) systems to recognize patterns, increase the speed of ordering and reduce food waste while storing data in a way that can be shared among communities and staff.
Operators such as Garden Spot Communities are also revamping their ordering software to not only make it easier for residents to get what they want, but to allow staff to spend more time with residents. The operator is in the middle of planning out its next two years of dining technology spending, showing it plans to invest heavily in these solutions.
To me, all of this shows operators are making a serious effort to improve their dining programs through new tools and tech. I don’t think senior living culinarians will have a lack of new tech and tools to choose from, but I do wonder how they will budget for them as tech budgets expand in just about every facet of operations. The answer to that question could lie in models that work like real restaurants or membership programs that generate revenue as opposed to being a cost center.
Industry serving up more creativity
- Photo by Andrew Christman, Senior Housing News Photo by Andrew Christman, Senior Housing News
- Photo by Andrew Christman, Senior Housing News Photo by Andrew Christman, Senior Housing News
- Photo by Andrew Christman, Senior Housing News Photo by Andrew Christman, Senior Housing News
In 2025, senior living chefs are not only making their food toothsome, but nutritious. At the same time, they are reducing and even eschewing certain ingredients in an effort to meet health and wellness needs.
That was on full display at the recent LCS cooking event. Judges scored dishes on their nutritional components, and in one round, the senior living chefs had to make dishes without using salt at all. The dishes I tried during the event were all varied and flavorful, and the chefs packed them full of nutrients. Based on my experience, I can only assume these dishes would be a hit with senior living residents.
The LCS event was only a taste of what I see the larger senior living industry doing with food. Operators such as Benchmark Senior Living believe that residents are increasingly looking for more elevated dining experiences and global flavors.
If choice is the name of the game for baby boomers, then I believe that current senior living dining options will suit them well. Operators are modifying their dining venues into smaller more intimate spaces that range from casual to chef’s table experiences. Operators are also growing more ingredients themselves, such as the case for Garden Spot Village, and working with local food producers to enhance farm-to-table offerings, such as what Harbor Retirement Associates has spent the past year focusing on.
Based on my recent conversations and what I saw during the LCS food event, I think operators will make their menus healthier and offer even more choices for residents who desire an ever-expanding array of flavors. All the while, they will have to make do with kitchens staffed by smaller teams and equipment that boosts efficiency.
I do foresee challenges ahead in what exactly operators will bring to their food programs and how residents will receive it. Although serving robots are fun to watch, multiple operators have told SHN that the tech amounted to a novelty in the end and didn’t boost efficiency much. While I think the novelty factor is strong and worth pursuing, operators must be careful not to heavily invest in something that works on paper but not in practice.
The post How Senior Living Operators Are Readying Dining Tech, Tastes for the Boomers appeared first on Senior Housing News.
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