Need assistance?
Expectations of dining, nutrition and mealtimes in aged care are evolving.
Standard 6 of the strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards makes it clear that providers must ensure residents receive nutritionally adequate food as well as choice and dignity at mealtimes. But while Standard 6 applies to residential aged care, home care is not missing out on the revolution.
Sona’s Kitchen is among those focused on ensuring dignity and choice in its Support at Home food offerings.
It was established in 2021 after director Sanjeev Sharma observed a lack of culturally appropriate food options in the New Zealand aged care home where his parents, who are Indian, live. As his parents are the home’s only residents from a South Asian background, they don’t get to enjoy familiar food, he says.
From this experience came Sona’s Kitchen – a ready-made meal service that seniors across Australia can access through their Support at Home package.
Sharma says he understands it’s not easy for an aged care home to cook ethno-specific meals for two people when they’re cooking for a hundred residents. But he says there’s no need for seniors living at home to miss out.
“When people are staying at home and when they have an option of ordering food and if government is supporting them to order food, it’s very important they get the right food,” Sharma tells The Ageing Agenda.
Food is critical to ensuring dignity and independence, Sharma says, and it’s critical that people can continue to access the food they are familiar with as they age.
“It is very important because people grow up eating one kind of food.”
He says his parents have spent their whole lives eating Indian food, such as rice and dhal, and they are connected to it.
“It connects them to their identity, they have the memory of the food,” he says. “Suddenly you start giving them something different which they have not consumed like mashed potatoes or roast beef or something they don’t really relate [to]. It’s very important for the emotional wellbeing as well, because that food keeps them connected, makes them happy.”
Older people and providers can register via Sona’s Kitchen’s website and staff will contact the aged care provider or care manager to get all the required approvals. The kitchen is halal-certified and Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point certified.
Menu items can also be tweaked to suit an individual’s dietary needs. Coming soon is extra information about meal options for people with special dietary needs, such as low-salt options or meals prepared with less oil.
Sharma says their customer base extends beyond Indian Australians and people from a South Asian background to other Australians who love Indian food or want a change from their regular food service.
In the next five years, Sharma says there will be many more people from a South Asian background entering the aged care system, and that it is important meal options reflect this.
“The ageing population from South Asia is growing and obviously the needs will be different, people will be looking for different kinds of food,” Sharma says.
Regional meal services crucial
Meanwhile in South Australia, Local Kitchen co-founder Sarsha Harvey is turning her attention to expanding her ready-made meal service to regional towns. Harvey started the food service in 2019 out of her own kitchen.
While there has been plenty of reform since then, she says the importance of ensuring older Australians can continue living independently in their own homes for as long as possible has remained constant.
“It is an incredibly important sector, and one we are very proud to be part of. Assisting older Australians with access to delicious, nutritious meals when they are no longer able to cook for themselves is a privilege. Knowing that our meals help support independence, wellbeing and quality of life is at the heart of what we do,” Harvey tells TAA.
“Like many providers, we’ve had to navigate significant changes and remain diligent with compliance requirements, including annual dietitian reviews and quality standards. Overall, we see Support at Home as a positive step that recognises the important role nutritious meals play in helping older Australians remain independent and well at home,” Harvey says.
While nutrition is key, variety and options are equally important, she says. “Choice is a key principle of the Aged Care Quality Standards because it supports independence, dignity and person-centred care,” says Harvey.
“Food is deeply personal, and older Australians should be able to choose meals that suit their preferences, dietary needs and lifestyle. Having that choice helps people maintain control over their daily lives and continue living independently at home with confidence.”
Local Kitchen has also become the first company in South Australia to enable Support at Home and NDIS participants to walk into a store and buy pre-made meals using their package funding.
Local Kitchen opened its first physical store in Malvern in 2021, providing ready-made, home-style meals. It now operates five physical stores and has plans to open another at the Adelaide Central Market in late 2026.
Previously, due to administrative compliance, Support at Home participants would have to order their meals online, even if they lived close to a physical store.
This would mean they could often only choose from frozen options. Now they can physically see items and even choose fresh salad options.
Harvey says the change is about giving Support at Home recipients the same choice as any other customer.
Customers must be registered through Support at Home or have an account set up with Local Kitchen through their provider. They can then fast-track a meal service by contacting their provider to complete an application on the Local Kitchen website.
Once approved by the Support at Home provider, customers can shop at any Local Kitchen store – located in Malvern, Parkside, Glenelg, Port Elliot and Modbury – and Local Kitchen will invoice the provider directly. Customers only pay their contribution towards the cost of ingredients in store.
Since opening, Harvey has expanded operations to Malvern, Parkside, Glenelg, Modbury, Port Elliot and Brooklyn Park. After seeing strong interest in regional areas, she is exploring opportunities to expand. But logistical differences can make servicing the regions more difficult than metropolitan areas.
Longer transport times mean Local Kitchen generally needs to provide frozen meals rather than chilled meals to ensure quality and food safety, Harvey says. But the focus on delivering nutritious, high-quality meals and a positive customer experience remains the same regardless of location, she says.
In the next five years, Harvey says she hopes to see aged care food services become more accessible to more older Australians, particularly those living in under-serviced areas. At the same time, it’s important that strong quality standards and robust oversight of nutrition, food safety and compliance are maintained, she says.
“I also believe technology will play an increasingly important role, helping providers improve ordering, delivery tracking, communication and service accessibility for older Australians and their support networks.”
Transport neglected in food safety
Technology that can help ensure quality food service during transportation is an area Ben Rogers, who founded Ground Catering Cold-Chain Assurance Protocol, understands well. GCCAP produces sealed cart-level temperature evidence to ensure adequate data coverage when transporting food, originally designed for the airline industry.
Rogers says transportation has traditionally been an overlooked part of food quality and safety. It’s a gap he is hoping to fill. With the strengthened aged care standards in place, the expectation has moved from needing to have a food safety procedure to being able to show what actually happened to the food – including when it’s on the way to the person, he says.
While most operations can measure temperature in the kitchen, very few can produce a proper record of what happened during transport and the leg between the kitchen and the resident, Rogers says.
“That’s the gap. It’s not that more documentation is coming one day. It’s that the requirement to show evidence – not just have a procedure – is already here, and the delivery leg is the part most people can’t yet account for,” Rogers tells TAA.
Much of the gap in food safety data is due to food delivery usually being done by a third party, so by the time it arrives at its destination “it’s gone through so many sets of hands” that if an incident occurs everyone “just points the finger at the next person … and it gets ugly and messy,” says Rogers.
Artificial intelligence has helped, with new data loggers available that can provide regular and consistent timestamps. However, while refrigerated trucks’ journeys are monitored, the standard is not high enough and differences in data loggers or non-certified data loggers can result in inconsistencies in calibration and data not being measured properly.
Issues and challenges include goods being left out, drivers taking breaks, vehicles breaking down or traffic causing the journey to take longer than planned, Rogers says.
“There are so many things, and if you’ve got a timestamp or a live recording that’s going all the time and it’s alerting you, then you can make changes. You can pack more dry ice ahead of time, or you can just change things along the way.”
Rogers acknowledges that aged care providers are already facing mountainous compliance burdens, but he wants to encourage the sector to try at least one food delivery monitoring platform.
“Even for just a trial, or negotiate a period and just see the data and what it provides,” says Rogers. “Most of those types of platforms will give a month free,” he says.
“You can see it all. You can see the protection. You can see all the gaps. It’s not pointing the finger at all; it’s just knowing where all the issues are and where you can make the changes going forward.”
To see how residential aged care providers are approaching the changing expectations around food, read part one of TAA’s series on optimising choice in aged care here.
Subscribe to The Ageing Agenda newsletters here and follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook
Advertisement
Comments are closed.