A strategy we are working on now is to streamline menu development across our five dining venues. We currently run five menus, each independently created by our individual venue chefs de cuisine. We have recently created a single six-week cycle menu that was created collaboratively by our culinary team that will rotate between the five venues. In doing this, we have reduced the number of menus running concurrently from 630 menus (breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week) to 126 menus over the six-week cycle. This still provides a great deal of variety for our residents, as they will never see the same item twice during the cycle in the same venue.
The upside is that if there is a menu item they enjoy, they will be able to go to one of our other venues to enjoy it within two weeks. From a procurement and waste perspective, 630 menus required approximately 3,200 recipes, all of them with different ingredients. It represents an approximately 80% reduction in SKUs, making inventory management much easier to facilitate and providing much greater opportunity for cross-utilization.
Eric Eisenberg
Senior Living Director of Dining Services
Rogue Valley Manor
Medford, Ore.