I’ve noticed something in aged care job advertisements for a while now, and I’m not sure I like where it’s heading.
The traditional Catering Manager role appears to be getting harder to find. In its place are broader positions covering catering, cleaning, laundry, accommodation services and, in some cases, lifestyle as well. At the same time, I’m seeing more three-month and six-month contracts built around alignment, improvement, mobilisation, remobilisation and transformation.
Perhaps I am more sensitive to it because, in the space of only a few weeks, three people working in what is already a very small specialist corner of aged care have been made redundant. And while this doesn’t make an industry trend – and I could simply be pattern-matching on too small a sample – in a niche profession, three in a matter of weeks is enough to make you look harder at what else is changing around them.
I have seen a professional role watered down before: the aged care chef
It’s a role that’s changed enormously over the years and some of that change was necessary and positive. Better systems, better food safety, improved technology, more sophisticated supply chains, and stronger clinical input have all changed kitchens for good reason.
But along the way, pieces of the chef’s traditional professional authority and identity also moved elsewhere:
- Purchasing became procurement
- Menus became increasingly centralised
- Products arrived further prepared
- Workforce decisions moved into broader operational structures
- Nutrition rightly became more multidisciplinary, and
- Compliance became more systemised.
In many kitchens, the chef remained responsible for the meal while controlling less of the system that produced it. The profession survived, of course, but in parts of the industry the professional narrative around what a chef is has become thinner.
We’re now beginning to see something similar happen to the Catering Manager
This doesn’t feel like something that’s been quietly occurring for the past ten years. It feels much more recent than that – and it’s accelerating. Providers are carrying larger portfolios and management structures are becoming broader. And the responsibilities that once sat within dedicated food-service leadership are increasingly being grouped under hospitality, hotel services, resident services or operations.
On paper, there is a logic to it. Catering, cleaning and laundry all support the resident environment so one leader can oversee multiple functions. Fewer management layers cost less and larger organisations can standardise systems across more homes. Technology can carry more reporting, auditing and administrative work, while specialist expertise can be brought in temporarily when a service needs to be aligned, improved or remobilised.
I can understand the organisational argument. What interests me is what happens to the professional capability underneath it.
This shift is occurring at a time when expectations around food and nutrition have moved from broad principle to explicit organisational responsibility. So, while organisational ownership of food appears to be broadening, the capability required to deliver it properly is becoming deeper. And this is the tension I keep coming back to.
Who owns food capability when nobody really owns catering anymore?
Not who orders the food supplies or signs off the roster. Not who receives the audit report or checks whether the food safety paperwork has been completed.
Who understands whether the organisation’s food-service workforce can deliver what its policies promise? Who sees the connection between procurement, production, texture modification and what finally reaches the resident?
Those questions become harder to answer when food is simply one part of a much larger operational portfolio.
This is where care minutes become part of the story
I would be very cautious about suggesting care minutes caused this shift because there are too many other pressures involved.
Provider consolidation, workforce shortages, rising costs, increasing regulation and the extraordinary growth aged care will need to manage over the coming years are all influencing how organisations and providers structure themselves.
But care minutes have undoubtedly changed the economics and visibility of labour.
Direct care is measured closely, while providers still need to manage every other part of the organisation efficiently. And in that environment, it’s not difficult to understand why non-clinical management layers would come under scrutiny.
That may help explain the rise of broader hospitality roles and short-term improvement contracts: maintain a leaner permanent structure, then bring in additional capability when alignment, remediation or transformation is required.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that model, but there’s one assumption we should be careful about: when a specialist position disappears, the specialist knowledge doesn’t automatically distribute itself among everybody else.
Specialist knowledge disappears with the role
The risk is not that nobody will be responsible for food. In fact, plenty of people may be responsible for pieces of it.
Procurement may own purchasing, quality may own compliance, clinical teams may own nutrition and swallowing requirements, operations may own labour and budgets, and kitchens may own production.
The harder question is: who still has enough line of sight across all the intersections to understand what happens when one decision affects another?
The capability gap no one’s talking about
Responsibility can be reassigned on an organisational chart – capability cannot. It must be deliberately developed, retained and transferred.
Perhaps the future lies less in traditional catering management and more in food and dining practice, workforce capability, hospitality standards, governance, resident experience and transformation. That could become the stronger model, but only if the capability is deliberately retained, rather than assumed to survive the restructure.
Because somewhere beneath the job titles, operating models and care-minute calculations is still an older person sitting down for lunch. They will never care what the role was called – they only experience whether the capability was there, or not.
What I’m suggesting isn’t whether aged care still needs Catering Managers. It’s whether aged care can afford to lose the capability these specialists were supposed to represent.
