Culinary Construction: How Kendal Corp., HRA Design Senior Living Dining Spaces

As senior living companies build new communities, some are putting culinary services at the forefront of their development plans.

Gone are the days of standardized menus and batch cooking. Instead, residents want more control over what they’re eating, and have started taking a more active role in their nutrition choice — a preference that is particularly strong with the incoming baby boomer generation. At the same time, senior living operators must keep residents healthy and safe when eating.

Faced with those new challenges, many senior living companies are getting creative with their communities’ culinary programs, and are laying the groundwork for them in the way their communities are designed. They include The Kendal Corporation, which is designing communities with resident food preferences in mind; and Harbor Retirement Associates (HRA), which is building kitchen spaces to boost productivity and efficiency of staff.

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“We didn’t worry so much about how big or small the kitchen needed to be, but really focused on what we were trying to get out of the space for our staff and residents,” said HRA VP of Hospitality Chris Thompson during the Senior Housing News DISHED-WELLNESS event in Orlando, Florida.

Function and form

In 2022, many new senior living developments emphasize multiple options for residents, including restaurants, pubs, cafes and bistros— some even with a public-facing component to engage local communities.

Vero Beach, Florida-based HRA, which has 36 communities across the U.S., first began emphasizing dining within its designs for new communities starting five years ago, according to Thompson.

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Thompson, who came aboard at HRA in 2018, takes the philosophy that senior living communities should not have restaurant-style dining venues, they should have venues that function as actual restaurants. But in order for that to happen, HRA needed to rethink the community spaces in which food was prepared.

Through multiple meetings with designers, Thompson helped draft what he called a “standardized box” for dining space and kitchen design. The concept emphasizes productivity and efficiency by prioritizing basic tenants for each design by standardizing total amount of equipment and total amount of space needed for preparation of meals, with the entire standardized approach being based off of need and not the square footage available in a given development.

“That was probably the biggest thing we did,” he said. It was commonplace a decade ago for kitchen designers to dictate how senior living culinary spaces were designed. But that’s not the case anymore, according to Ben Butler, VP of Culinary Services, Operations and Procurement at The Kendal Corp.

“We adapted to the space and we made it work,” Butler said of the way the company used to think about kitchen designs “But what we’ve done now is we’ve flipped that and we have two approaches for redesigns and new construction.”

When approaching a redesign, Butler said Kendal first analyzes a space and the food that is to be prepared and served there. The company also works with kitchen designers and interior designers and determines what equipment they will need, with a focus on infrastructure.

Kendal put together work groups with staff to come up with concepts needed for kitchen design that allowed for an all-hands-on-deck approach to kitchen and dining concept development.

In a new build, Kendal’s teams take stock of the local restaurant scene to understand what residents might want as part of a dining experience. That in turn allows the company to understand the local food scene and what tastes are most popular for locals which informs menu concepts.

Kendal is putting these lessons to work at Enso Village, a $300 million “zen-inspired” life plan community under construction in Healdsburg, California. The community’s design incorporates “mindful aging” elements, and gives residents plenty of access to the outdoors.

The community is planned to include two main dining venues and a speakeasy-style bar off of the main dining area, Butler said. Kendal designed the venues to serve members of the public in addition to residents. All of this is joined by a teaching kitchen for the public and residents to interact and connect with the food they eat. Also notable is that one of the dining components will have an all vegetarian, plant-based menu accompanied by wine tastings on the weekends with a sommelier on-hand to enhance the dining experience. 

“We really want to be part of the community, and we want folks to come use the space,” Butler said.

Getting it right, defining differences

The relationship between feasibility, affordability and concept within senior living design is nothing new, and senior living designers have long had to weigh certain design elements with the reality of high construction costs or other barriers.

Food costs are another rising expense category in senior living. That’s why HRA designs spaces to prioritize efficiency.

“We are a firm believer in creating environments that minimize your kitchen work triangle and making the individual more efficient,” Thompson said. “So that value is really present at the end of the day.”

Thompson came to HRA from working in hospitality, and that experience led him to advise the company to pursue designs that do not leave staff under-equipped in terms of equipment or space.

Thompson added that each senior living kitchen must have certain “baseline functionalities,” that promote function, staff efficiency and service.

“You should be looking at it from a standpoint of designing a professional kitchen that is functional for a multitude of reasons and not have it be a limited kitchen that is only going to do x, y, or z. Once you hit that threshold, you are pretty much cut off.”

To get back-of-house design right, Kendal works holds a “vision session” to envision a space before any construction starts; and to determine whether a designer is a good fit for the project’s scope and goals.

“It’s really a cultural fit between the team, the residents and the kitchen designer,” Butler said. “They can deeply listen and hear what the residents and staff have to say, then we make sure that is reflected in the design.”

Many senior living operators, including HRA, differentiate dining venues based on care settings like independent living and memory care.

“In some areas, it’s very obvious and some projects we are still operating out of one main production kitchen,” Thompson said. “So from a design perspective, it’s probably more on the menu-side than it is the physical plant side.”

Regarding front-of-house design, Thompson and Butler highlighted the need to bring spaces to life with more focus on aesthetics; rather than pure functionality, like in a restaurant kitchen. The residents want to be enticed to dine there out of choice, not necessity, they said.

“It’s really more about us bringing functionality, efficiency and making sure that the space speaks to the concept and to the brand,” Thompson added.

Butler said most senior living dining spaces used to be cookie-cutter — but gone are the days of old trim and dim lighting. Now it’s all about blending wellness, appearance and social interactions.

Along the way, Kendal finds places to cut costs, including by offering scaled-down amenities, or by using equipment already found in communities and relocating them adjacent to the dining space, from soap dispensers, juice machines and coffee makers rather than duplicating equipment costs.

“We wait to see what we really need like the cooking suite and the stuff that makes it fun,” Butler said. “We want to create a kitchen that somebody can walk into, see what’s happening and be a place people can be happy to work in.”

Butler believes that food is at the center of resident well being. As such he sees a day when culinary teams and health and wellness staffers work more closely in tandem. .

“Blending the culinary teams more with the teams from our health care side of the work is going to be really critical in the future,” he added.

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