I work within the White Oaks team, part of Compass Group UK & Ireland’s Healthcare sector. The White Oaks team is dedicated to food and dining services across the senior living sector, specialising in care, extra care and retirement living.
In each, the team creates a food service offer that is developed to meet the specific mealtime preferences and needs of residents and tenants, offering quality, choice and flexibility throughout the day.
Our collective purpose is to deliver a quality food service at the highest level, placing residents at the very heart of that service. By doing this, we can guarantee a professionally managed and innovative food and dining experience – supporting better living, a ‘home from home’ environment and a sense of community that is important to our clients and residents alike.
Importance of mealtimes
Mealtimes for our residents are more than just a source of nutrition – they provide pivotal interactions throughout the day, which provide opportunities for a sense of community, familiarity and enjoyment.
There is no doubt that in these settings, food brings our residents together, evokes memories and the meals we provide play a vital role in care, contributing to more general good health, morale and wellbeing.
Our extensive menus are created by our team of chefs and dietitians, who work side by side to produce dishes that have an attractive and appetising appeal, plus strike the balance between great taste and delivering the required nutritional benefits. We offer a choice of options at each mealtime and ensure that they are presented and served in an environment that encourages residents to eat well.
Vegetarian and vegan options
Plant-based food is rising in popularity among the general public, however in our care home settings it is not a dominant trend
at the moment. We foresee this growing rapidly over the coming
years, with an ageing population that includes more people that embrace vegetarian, vegan and flexitarian diets.
Reducing meat intake has now become a lifestyle choice for many people, especially as we are all more conscious of food choices from a health, locality, seasonal, ethical and environmental perspective.
As a wider business, we are constantly analysing recipes for health and environmental impacts and within Compass Group UK & Ireland, we have encouraged an increase in the use of plant-based proteins – for our chefs this has created an opportunity for innovation.
Nutritional needs for older adults (those aged 65 years and over) are slightly different from the rest of the adult population. It is recognised that older people need a nutrient-rich diet, which means choosing foods which contain slightly more protein or calcium, for example, as protein is vital to maintaining muscle strength and reducing the risk of muscle loss and frailty.
Many residents in care homes are also at a higher risk of malnutrition, so it is imperative that meals provided meet both preferences and nutritional needs. Many vegetarian dishes are popular and already feature widely on our menus including omelettes, macaroni or cauliflower cheese, savoury tarts, vegetable pasta bake or vegetarian cottage pie – they can be rich in protein and other key nutrients.
Plant-based (vegan) meals are currently less popular and tend to be naturally lower in protein and micronutrients, including vitamin B12, folate, calcium, iron, zinc and iodine, so where these are prevalent, it is important that they contain a good source of protein and chefs make use of ingredients such as beans, pulses, nuts and soya proteins to ensure meals meet protein needs, within a suitable portion size.
In addition, the carbohydrate, vegetables and accompaniments in vegetarian and vegan meals should be similar to the regular menu and appropriate for the dish with which they are served. Suitable vegetarian or vegan gravy and sauces should also be provided as appropriate to the dish. These should be encouraged as they can make food less dry and therefore easier to eat.
Accommodating preferences
When planning our menus, we spend time considering which dishes to include – plant-based meals can offer the opportunity for residents to try something different and can be tested during theme days and activities to ensure residents would like to see this on the menu. They can also feature on ‘specials’ menus where residents might like the option to try something different.
Catering teams should have the knowledge and skills to cook familiar and appropriate meals for all residents including those who choose a vegetarian or vegan diet. The same standard of food and drink offer should be provided for all residents, to avoid meal repetition as much as possible.
It’s important to mention that our chefs cater for a broad spectrum of dietary requirements, as we need to meet everyone’s specific needs and, in these settings, they can be varied. With this commitment in mind, I was lucky enough to Chair the group that created the recently released Care Home Digest – this has been a really significant step forward for the care sector.
The Digest is the first of its kind for care homes for older people, providing menu planning and food service guidelines to support home teams to provide high-quality food and drink services for residents. Chapters in the Digest include nutrition and hydration needs, delivering a positive mealtime experience, menu planning and design and catering for special diets.
The Digest also covers the importance of choice in terms of what residents are eating and their portion size and how homes can work to review and enhance meal services. What is key for me here is the respect of our residents’ choices. It is our job to provide food that residents actually want to eat, as well as being nutritionally valuable.
Where we are accommodating vegetarian and vegan diets, the Digest highlights that a vegetarian or vegan diet should meet a resident’s nutritional needs and include foods like soya, tofu, calcium-fortified plant-based milks, fortified breakfast cereals, nuts and beans can help to support residents to eat a nutritionally balanced diet.
Furthermore, residents who are vegetarian or vegan may have additional dietary needs, such as swallowing difficulties and/or diabetes, which may require further consideration and meal planning. These additional needs, combined with taste preferences, poor appetite and/or cultural preferences, can increase the risk of malnutrition. Where there are long-term challenges to overcome to meet residents’ nutritional needs, professional advice from a dietitian should be sought.
Food passports
Through catering for specific diets and understanding the residents’ needs we created our food passport system – this enables better care and consistency, as well as supporting communication between caterers and care teams.
Our food passports are often useful for understanding specific dietary requirements, such as those following a vegetarian diet, those with religious requirements or those with dysphagia, who require texture modified meals. However, they also allow a resident to tell us about their ‘food story’ and how they like their meals to be
individualised for them.
Evolving menus
We strive to constantly be at the forefront of menu development, evolving our menus to cater for residents by ensuring we understand the up-and-coming trends and practices that are emerging within the marketplace. We value feedback and think it is important to collect this from our residents and their families, so we host regular food forums and ask people to take part in surveys so that we can review offers and implement changes where possible.
We understand that residents often love our classic, homestyle meals, but also encourage them to try new tastes and concepts. To support this, we often host themed food events and ask our residents to join in baking and cooking as an interactive activity. This can be through our calendar to celebrate traditions or events throughout the year. It is often an opportunity to try things a bit differently within our menus, sometimes including vegetarian and vegan options.
Looking ahead
In anticipating the growth in this area, we are continuing to innovate across vegetarian and vegan menus, catering for this need more frequently. Across the sector, it will be an interesting shift to monitor, and I believe it will inspire creativity. We must be mindful to always put the residents’ needs at the centre of our planning and create great-tasting choices that they will enjoy eating.
Helen Ream is a Healthcare and Food Service Dietitian at Compass Group UK & Ireland.
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Are you seeing an increased interest in vegetarian or vegan options in your care setting? Is this something you are encouraging people to try?