A 2011 Best of the Best Program to Watch, Vintage Senior Living’s Dining Excellence Program offers eco-friendly, nutritious, and fresh foods through menus that engage residents and offer many healthful choices.
Vintage Senior Living has planted the seeds for an eco-friendly, healthy dining program that eventually will replace all frozen and powdered foods with a full-scratch kitchen. The cornerstone of the new program is the “Vintage Signature Collection” menu, offering locally grown, seasonally available foods.
To supplement the array of choices and engage residents in the process, Vintage also is providing a garden in each senior living community for residents and staff to grow vegetables, herbs, and flowers through its Harvest to Home program.
“This has been a passion of mine for many years,” says Shawn Stanchfield, corporate director of food service and the program’s crusader, who used to own a health food restaurant. Today’s seniors, he says, “have a sophisticated palette. They want and appreciate fresh food.”
That may be particularly true of Vintage residents, who were raised in Northern California’s farm country. “Salinas is a huge farming community. You can imagine the pushback when we tried to serve them frozen vegetables,” says Stanchfield.
The hurdles involved in launching the program included coming up with the right equipment to provide cooking from scratch, raising the skill level of the staff, aligning with local produce providers, and educating residents.
“It’s an ongoing process. We’re eliminating a lot of frozen premade foods, and frozen powdered applications are gone. We’re making all soups from scratch,” he says.
Thanks to the new program, the dining directors now think in terms of making a quick bread or fresh muffins instead of buying frozen. “There’s been a real buy-in from the local staff,” says Stanchfield. “For some of these cooks it’s been kind of like ‘scoop and serve.’ So the fact that now we’re batch cooking our salmon so it’s going to be served two minutes later, that’s exciting for them. It’s more like a professional five-star restaurant.”
Most gratifying has been the response from residents. When Vintage offered a free outdoor “farmer’s market” at their communities last summer, residents were weighed down with bags of fresh produce. When a community hosted a food demonstration on fiber and offered samples as part of the new program, the residents ate it up in more ways than one. Says Stanchfield, “With the residents, it’s so exciting, I can’t do it quick enough for them. They constantly want more.”
Given a choice between year-round strawberries and strawberries that taste good, the residents’ preference is clear. “They want and appreciate the best, freshest seasonable food available,” says Stanchfield. “They really get it.”
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