The benefits of home cooking for residential aged care and supported independent living providers

For residential aged care and disability service providers, you’ve got plenty of tasks already on your plate. Along with providing care and support to residents and participants, you’re also tasked with staying across meal costs, too.

We know that frozen and ready-made meals can seem like an easy fix to the meal time dilemma. But the reality is that preparing nutritious, delicious home-cooked meals offers stacks of benefits for your team and your residents. And it’s easier to do than you might think.

Keep reading to discover the benefits of home cooking and how SmithKit is the ‘ugh’ out of home cooking for participations, SIL and aged care residents.

Benefit 1: Improve your meal service and create happier residents

Everyone deserves to have a say in what’s on the menu. With a home-cooked meal planner in place, you can give each resident the opportunity to choose what they eat for each meal (and ditch frozen meals for good).

With home cooking in place, residents are empowered to participate in their own meal preparation (wherever possible). And even if they’re not cooking for themselves, having greater freedom and autonomy to decide what they eat will make for a better mealtime experience for everyone.

It’s also likely that your residents will have a range of unique preferences and nutrition needs that need to be accommodated for, too. With a home-cooked meal planner in place, you can customise this ahead of time and make sure each resident has a meal they’ll enjoy (while meeting their dietary needs, too).

Plus, the best home cooked meal planners will give residents the chance to provide feedback about what dishes they do and don’t love. With this transparent feedback loop in place, you’ll be able to tailor each resident’s menu and switch out recipes when needed to keep everyone happy and healthy.

Benefit 2: Reduce food waste and lower your food bill

Here’s a sobering stat for you: food businesses in NSW throw away nearly one-third of all food they produce. In financial terms, food waste costs the Australian economy roughly $20 billion every year.

Switching to home cooking can actually help to lower your food waste and stop money ending up in the bin. In fact, with a meal planner in place your team can shop for the exact ingredients they need on a weekly or fortnightly basis, meaning you’ll never spend on ingredients you won’t use.

By planning out your home-cooked meals in advance, you’ll be able to see exactly how much you’ll be spending (as well as the nutritional value of meals for your residents).

Benefit 3: Boost kitchen skills among your team

One of the biggest barriers to home cooking for SIL providers is this: lack of kitchen skills and confidence.

But one of the best ways to retain staff and support their professional development is to offer a program that helps them to learn the basics to prepare home cooked meals. And it’s easier than you might think, with programs like SmithKit giving providers access to easy, beginner-friendly recipes that anyone can master.

With a meal planner in place and easy recipes ready to go, your team will become more efficient in the kitchen (without relying on pre-made, packaged meals) and able to better serve your residents, too.

How SmithKit can help you make the switch to home cooking

We designed SmithKit specifically for residential aged care and SIL providers, with one goal in mind: to offer the easiest way to plan and prepare delicious, home-cooked meals for your residents.

Our flexible digital meal planner is packed with over 1,800 recipes that even the most hesitant cooks will be able to whip up in minutes. Using a single online platform you can customise the menus and recipes for each home in minutes to make meal stress a thing of the past.

Plus, each recipe comes with a nutritional and cost snapshot so you’ll never be left guessing about the food bill either.

Simply by logging in our management dashboard you’ll get a clear picture of the menus and cost summaries of multiple homes in a few clicks to help you make informed decisions (while also giving your residents meaningful choice over what they eat each day).

Ready to get started in just a few minutes? Find out more about SmithKit’s flexible subscription models and start preparing delicious, nutritious home-made meals for your residents.