Healthcare Heroes

Chefs from this competitive segment must stay creative to avoid complacency and certain challenges //

By Kenya McCullum

Even in normal circumstances, running kitchens in the healthcare space can be challenging — from creating appetizing, specialized menu choices for those with healthdriven, dietary considerations to understanding age-related behavioral changes in the seniors that chefs see every day. Today, healthcare chefs are rising to these unique challenges, though, thanks in part to the culinary skills they already have and the lessons learned during the pandemic.

Incentivizing Staff

Like in other segments, staffing has been an ongoing challenge for healthcare chefs, including Chef Ryan Conklin, CEC , director and executive chef of culinary and nutritional services for the North Carolina-based UNC REX Healthcare. However, he says he has made strides in getting staffing back on track by changing his approach to hiring.

“At my lowest point, I had a 40% vacancy rate on our culinary team, but that is slowly improving,” he says. “While our hiring standards have always been high, my team has been forced to reimagine things a little and are now willing to look more at an applicant’s potential, rather than [just] experience.”

ACF Chef Gabriel Rosado, CEC, executive chef and director of hospitality and nutrition services for Community Healthcare System, a senior living center in Munster, Indiana, says he has experienced ups and downs with staffing but has also implemented strategies to attract employees. Already, he’s seen improvements with recruitment, retention and overall company morale.

“We [offered] some cash incentives for individuals picking up shifts as a thank you,” he says. “We also provide lunch every single day, and for the most part, any time we get a special request, we're making sure to make a special meal. We’re feeding [our staff] and keeping them happy. I think these incentives certainly have helped.”

ACF Chef Jeffrey Quasha, CEC, CCA, AAC , senior director of culinary innovation at Morrison Healthcare, says the company, which provides culinary staff to hospitals, created a training program to help meet staffing needs.

“We are always looking for chefs that are recent graduates of culinary school looking to get a lot of training,” he says. “They learn all of the ins and outs of our program — patient feeding, retail, food costs, recipe writing, forecasting, ordering — and then, anyone who graduates from that program is offered a full-time culinary position in a hospital that has an opening as a chef.”

Staying Competitive

When trying to find ways to remain competitive with his food, Chef Conklin says that focusing on the little things makes a big difference in delivering the variety diners crave.

“Right now, variety is key,” he says. “We really want all our guests to feel like they have a wide array of things to choose from. We are really focusing on the little things that can sometimes be overlooked or taken for granted. Take a deli sandwich, for example. We’ve honed in on ensuring premium meats, cheeses and toppings are used, as well as the freshest and best quality of bread. Then we think about the assembly process: How is it wrapped? How is it presented?”

When creating menus for residents at the senior living communities he serves, Chef Rosado uses his past experience at country clubs to keep menus fresh and diners happy.

“We have a five-week-cycle menu that changes seasonally,” he says. “I feature two soups, three entrees, two starches and two vegetables a day, and then we have a featured dessert of the day.”

In order to make decisions that help keep menus fresh, Chef Quasha relies on information from third-party research firm Datassential.

“I love Datassential; we're constantly looking at the stages of a trend, so my job is to analyze data concepts that place us right in the middle of a trend,” Chef Quasha says. “So if it's chiles right now, we're always looking at what's happening in the world and then creating concepts we can launch. And we might sit on a concept for a year because it might be too far ahead of a trend.”

Smarter Technology

To ensure that everything flows smoothly from the kitchen to the customer, Chef Conklin says UNC REX Healthcare has been using an app-based ordering platform.

“It has made it a much easier environment to work in, as this technology has helped to make busy meal periods more spread out and even-flowing, instead of one big rush of customers at once,” he says. “We are now able to send push notifications to highlight daily specials right to our customers’ phones and emails.”

To help push out food to senior living residents, Chef Rosado is using smart technology cooking equipment.

“We have a combi oven, which is a combination of hot air and steam heat. It has smart technology built into it, so you can actually program specific recipes into a database,” he says. “We can cook things on different levels of the shelving inside of the oven, and it helped us streamline the process and better cook quality items simultaneously, just to cut down the cooking times altogether.”

In order to help keep the menus fresh, Chef Quasha uses an app that collects data on orders the kitchen receives so that trends can be monitored to help improve service.

“Depending on the geography of where the hospital is located, we can look at trend data from all of our locations and determine which concepts run best based on generational or trend data or regional data,” he says. “It allows all of our units a back door in, and they can change menus on a weekly basis, or they can change them on a daily basis, so it keeps our menus fresh.”

The State of Healthcare

Chef Conklin says he is optimistic about the future, despite the challenges he’s faced in the kitchen, and he’s looking forward to learning, growing and demonstrating his passion on the plate.

“‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ is a quote I’ve repeated my whole time as a chef, and never was there a time that it has been truer,” he says. “We’ve learned to truly value your team, who continue to show up day in and day out for us. Without a solid team, your continued success is very limited as a chef. I’ve learned that I should be working just as hard for them as they work for me, so I should be continually providing them with opportunities to grow. That’s my real passion now.”

Chef Rosado says he’s thinking today about the preferences of the aging population that will become the senior living residents of tomorrow.

“I do expect the food preferences to change from generation to generation,” he says. “The next group of residents we expect to see in the upcoming years is the baby boomers, and they certainly do eat a bit differently than my current residents. I see the demand for plant proteins going up, specifically here in senior living, as it is around the world. That’s one of the biggest trends I expect will make its way into healthcare and senior living.”

Similarly, Chef Quasha believes the aging population will be a driver for future choices chefs will make.

“I think culinary medicine is going to be a huge piece of the future. For years, chefs were trying to get their certification, and if you were a chef and knew a lot about wine, it helped you when it came to your resume,” he says. “But I think with the boomers retiring and the post-pandemic world, culinary medicine certifications are going to be a big piece of the puzzle moving forward — being able to validate that you’re serving healthy food and you're helping to heal.”