Kitchen Counts provides a food cost control system purpose-built for private long-term care, retirement, and memory care operators. Our team runs weekly inventory counts, monitors vendor pricing, and delivers a Thursday report to your Executive Director and Nutrition Manager: without taking over the kitchen, the chef, or the menu.
Designed for operators who want Compass-grade inventory discipline while keeping the kitchen in-house. Built around per-resident-day food cost, IDDSI compliance, and the regulatory inventory thresholds that define LTC operations.
Private LTC, retirement, and memory care operators are caught between two bad options: hand the kitchen to Compass and lose control of the food program, or keep the kitchen and hope the discipline holds through every FSM transition, every audit cycle, every Ministry inspection. Kitchen Counts is the third option.
A one-month on-site build, your team trained to run the weekly counts, vendor monitoring, and Thursday report, then QA from us, sized to your operation. Your chef and your menu stay exactly where they are. The NS envelope gets fully deployed, documented, and defended — without the kitchen leaving your hands.
Independent studies on in-house versus contracted-out food service in long-term care. Quoted verbatim, with sources.
Executive Directors and Nutrition Managers at private LTC are navigating a slow-motion decision. The kitchen costs more every year, the team turns over, and the contract foodservice pitch keeps landing on your desk. The regulated environment makes it harder to act than it should be.
Contract foodservice operators bring real operational discipline, and they bring it at a real cost, both in fees and in control. Once you outsource, the menu, the staff, and the resident food experience are no longer yours. The contract is multi-year. You can’t easily come back.
The Food Service Manager you hired last year just left. Their institutional knowledge (pars, vendor relationships, recipe cards, menu cycle logic) left with them. The replacement starts at zero. The food cost drifts up while they ramp.
The Ministry’s Nursing/Nutrition Supplement envelope is $13.44 per resident-day. Homes that can’t prove they deployed it fully and spent it correctly are exposed to clawback. Most kitchens don’t have the documentation layer to defend their spend. Kitchen Counts provides it.
When the Ministry arrives, you need records: IDDSI compliance, therapeutic supplement tracking, allergen documentation, spend against the NS envelope. Most kitchens generate these reactively. A systematic discipline layer means the records exist before the inspection, not because of it.
Kitchen Counts operates on a weekly rhythm that respects how care kitchens actually run. We work around your menu cycle, your chef's prep schedule, and your reporting deadlines, fitting the cadence to your operation.
Our team arrives on-site and runs a 30-minute walkthrough and inventory count on your key cost drivers. Proteins, dairy, therapeutic supplements, anything regulated. Service doesn’t stop. The data arrives clean.
On-site, flexible to your scheduleBy Tuesday, the counts hit the system. Actual versus theoretical usage, par exceptions, vendor price flags. We surface what changed and why. Nothing for the operator to interpret.
Available by Tuesday end-of-dayLive tracking of every invoice against a four-week baseline. Anything past five percent gets flagged the same week. Your Sysco rep doesn’t get a phone call. Your inventory line item does.
Continuous, not weeklyThe deliverable. Lands in your inbox by 5pm every Thursday, a day before week's end so you can act on it. Two pages. Four numbers that matter. Three to five operator-readable insights.
In your inbox by Thursday 5pmWeekly workshops on inventory discipline, envelope tracking, and IDDSI compliance that help your production, not disrupt it, through the one-month build. We don't train and leave; the discipline gets embedded in your team, week by week, then we step back to QA.
Weekly through the build, then QAWeekly counts surface a 6% variance in chicken thigh against par, traced to a specific shift’s portion size on therapeutic-textured plates. The Thursday Report flags the variance, the workshop addresses the prep technique, food cost drops back to target by week three.
The drift gets named and fixed in two weeks, not at quarter-end.
Kitchen Counts continues running through the FSM transition. The new manager inherits a system that already works: pars are set, vendor relationships are mapped, recipes are costed, the Thursday Report cadence is in place. The ramp time goes from six months to three weeks.
The system survives the hire. Institutional knowledge stays with you, not with the manager.
We surface the per-resident-day food cost trend from week one, against your regional budget envelope. By the time Corporate asks, you have six months of clean data, segmented by category, with the variance story already written. The conversation goes from “where are we” to “here’s where we are and why.”
The reporting layer is already there when Corporate calls.
The NS envelope tracked, documented, and defended — every week. Full deployment, nothing clawed back.
More food value per locked-in envelope dollar: less waste, more quality reaching residents.
From signed engagement to first Thursday Report. Service built, pars set, counts running.
Additional headcount required. We’re a layer on top of your existing team, not a replacement.
The choice isn't really between outsourced foodservice and the status quo. It's between three operating models, each with a different cost: in fees, in control, and in what your kitchen looks like five years from now. Here's the honest framing.
Compass / Aramark / Sodexo
in-house, no operational layer
one-month install, then license & QA
Numbers vary by operation, region, and contract terms. The walkthrough call sizes the math to your specific facility.
“Long-term care kitchens are caught in a structural bind. The hospitality industry treats them as an afterthought. The healthcare industry treats them as a support function. Neither one builds the discipline these kitchens actually need to feed residents well, on budget, year after year. Kitchen Counts exists to close that gap by giving the kitchen the operational layer it's never had, without replacing the kitchen itself.”
Ethan J. AllwoodFounder, Kitchen CountsYears in high-level kitchen operations kept showing me the same pattern. Most kitchens rely on sole-person heroics. This places strain on the people who invest in the business the most. I built Kitchen Counts to protect them.
You made it through Care Kitchens.
Next: Restaurant OperatorsBook a 30-minute walkthrough and we'll go through Kitchen Counts with you: your operation, your numbers, your team. No slide decks.
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