A very big HAPPY BIRTHDAY to the Standard 6 quality standards which, on 1 November 2026, turned one. I suspect a few people working in an aged care kitchen organised a birthday cake, but we shouldn’t pretend the conversation starts with the candles.
It is still an anniversary worth recognising though? I really hope so.
After years of food being treated as something the kitchen simply had to get out on time, the strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards gave food, nutrition and dining a dedicated standard of their own – and so they should have!
Choice, enjoyment, safe nutrition and the experience around the table are now explicit responsibilities, not optional extras when a budget permits.
But, sorry to point this out for your birthday QS’, the trouble is that the figures that arrived just before the anniversary made for some very uncomfortable reading…
StewartBrown’s FY2026 findings, presented at its October finance forum, show 65% of surveyed residential aged care operators recorded an operating loss, while the average operating result across participating homes was a deficit of $12.98 per bed day. The direct-care margin has almost disappeared, and everyday living still runs at a loss.
This is a hard environment in which to ask people to do more. And a hard conversation to put out there considering the overall industry challenges that are front and centre at the moment.
However, the newly released 2025 Residents’ Experience Survey tells its own story.
Across 44,318 responses from 2,589 homes, 89% of residents would recommend their home, but just 69% said they liked the food. And the food figure is hardly new. It was 70% in 2022, 70% in 2023 and 70% in 2024.
Four annual surveys, and food has been the lowest-rated question every single time.
FIGURE 1: Share of residents responding positively. Source: Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Residents’ Experience Survey findings 2022–2025.
Look a little closer and the picture sharpens.
Only 27% of residents said they always liked the food in 2025. Another 42% said most of the time, 26% said some of the time and 5% said never. For mealtimes that happen several times a day, “some of the time” is a fairly modest endorsement. And while the share of residents answering “always” rose on nine of the other ten comparable questions between 2022 and 2025, on food it did not move: 27% then, 27% now.
Meanwhile, the share of residents recommending their home rose from 85% in 2023 to 89% in 2025. Residents are quite capable of appreciating their carers while being unimpressed by dinner. We should resist the temptation to hear the praise and quietly file the criticism.
Among coded answers to the open-ended question about what residents would change, food and dining was the leading theme (39.5%), ahead of staffing levels and training. That is not the share of all residents who dislike the food. It is a clear signal of what people want changed when someone actually asks them.
Loud in surveys, quiet in complaints
Here is the part that should worry boards most. Food does not appear among the regulator’s five most common complaint issues in residential care in any of the last three reported years. Medication management and staffing levels lead the list, yet food is the first thing residents name when asked what they would change.
That is not because food matters less, it’s because a disappointing lunch rarely feels serious enough to escalate. The dissatisfaction is spread across hundreds of small moments instead of landing as one incident, so it never shows up as an event on a quality dashboard.
Silence is often read as satisfaction: it rarely is.
The regulator has noticed. Before the new standards commenced, the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission named food, nutrition and dining as one of three key areas of sector risk in residential care and reported that many providers still struggled to offer choice and meet individual needs, particularly for people needing texture-modified food and thickened fluids.
The law began in 2025. The notice we all had did not.
The 2025 survey cannot tell us whether Standard 6 succeeded or failed in its first twelve months. Those results were collected during 2025 and published in October 2026, so they are a baseline, not a verdict. What they do give us is a long-running signal that predates the law itself.
The Royal Commission began in October 2018. The previous Quality Standards, which already covered food, daily living and resident choice, applied from July 2019. The Royal Commission’s final report arrived in March 2021, and a review of the standards followed.
Public consultation on the strengthened standards ran in late 2022, just as the first national resident survey reported 70% positive food responses. The draft was piloted with 40 providers in 2023 and residents again reported 70%. The new Act passed Parliament in 2024, and the food score was still 70%. The Act was deferred from July to November 2025 to allow more preparation, the final standards were published in August, and the 2025 food result came in at 69%.
The timing of the evidence deserves attention too. The 2024 survey was conducted between February and October 2024, and its results were publicly released on 8 September 2025, weeks before the new standards commenced. It was already telling the sector that food was the weakest part of residents’ experience. Collection date, publication date and commencement date are not interchangeable, but none of them makes the earlier signal disappear.
To be fair, the final rules evolved and providers faced genuine operational pressure. A legal start date matters, and plenty of homes did not wait for it and some were already doing what the commission envisaged. But knowing a requirement is coming and waiting for the day it becomes enforceable are two very different things. Four years of consistent resident feedback should not have needed a commencement date before it deserved action.
We should also be precise about what the numbers can and cannot say.
Survey years are not a before-and-after trial, and a flat national result does not mean that no home improved. It does mean the sector has yet to show overall improvement in the one daily experience residents keep asking us to change.
The funding argument matters, so get it right
James Wiltshire recently asked who takes responsibility when the price government pays and the actual cost of care drift apart. It is a fair question, and the sector cannot keep answering it by pointing at the next organisation in the chain.
But if we are talking about food, we need to be talking about the right funding stream. AN-ACC funds direct care. Meals sit in everyday living, alongside cleaning, laundry and utilities, funded by the basic daily fee and the hotelling supplement. StewartBrown’s argument that the AN-ACC price should have been $310.91 rather than $303.19 is a serious one, but it is not a catering argument, and conflating the two would make a powerful headline and a poor case.
The food-relevant numbers are elsewhere. The hotelling supplement rose to $22.15 a day in September 2025 and was held there this October. IHACPA’s own estimate is that, for homes without additional or extra service fee revenue, everyday living costs will exceed revenue by $5.81 per resident per day. StewartBrown puts the gap higher and wants the supplement lifted to at least $27.96. In small rural towns, StewartBrown’s data shows the gap widening to almost $14 a day.
That is the funding conversation food belongs in.
I am not suggesting the funding problem is small. I am suggesting we need to be precise enough to be taken seriously.
There is another cost hiding in plain sight
I have spent 40 years around commercial kitchens and aged care services, and one thing remains remarkably consistent: when a meal goes wrong, the invoice rarely tells the whole story.
A missed diet change can mean another meal, additional work and an avoidable risk for the resident. A poorly coordinated meal tray run leaves hot food cooling on a trolley while staff scramble to find the right person to deliver it. A texture-modified meal can pass the correct IDDSI test and still be so unappealing that the resident barely touches it. None of those gets fixed by shaving another few cents off ingredients.
The cost moves quietly into different departments. Catering records the food. Care records the intake concern. Quality handles the complaint, finance sees the agency bill, and the resident receives the whole complicated system as one meal.
It is an impressively complicated way to avoid owning one service.
That does not mean poor catering causes every case of malnutrition or workforce turnover. Nutrition risk is complicated, and organisations face legitimate funding constraints. But a cost that lands somewhere else in the ledger does not cease to exist.
My 2026 Kitchen Pulse Survey asked 50 aged care chefs across metropolitan, regional, rural and remote homes what they actually see. Only 14% said they consistently have enough time and staffing to produce the food they want to serve, and 76% named staffing shortages as their biggest single pressure. Kitchen-care communication came up as a major operational pressure for 42%.
Asked what most affects the resident’s dining experience; they put dining room staffing and support first (66%) and communication between kitchen and care second (62%). Food quality came fourth, at 32%. The percentages are different, but the issue appears in both questions. That recurring concern deserves investigation, not a claim of causation.
FIGURE 2: What chefs say most affects the resident dining experience. Share of 50 chef respondents selecting each factor; more than one could be selected. Source: 2026 Australian Aged Care Kitchen Pulse Survey, an exploratory practitioner survey, not a representative national sample.
That ranking is not chefs deflecting blame. It is the people closest to the meal saying the kitchen can do its job beautifully and still lose the meal somewhere between the pass and the resident.
Residents do not experience the gap between kitchen and care as a system failure. They live it as a dining experience failure.
Then there is succession. I have seen capable chefs become the unwritten operating manual for an entire home, right down to who needs their toast cut a particular way. When knowledge lives with people, consistency leaves with them. Without a support plan, genuine site coverage and a proper handover, replacing a chef costs considerably more in disruption than the recruitment advertisement suggests, although the precise amount still has to be measured.
Standard 6 is not a menu standard
The Standard’s four outcomes cover partnership with residents, assessment of needs and preferences, the provision of safe and appetising food and drink, and the dining experience itself. That last part is where some of the nicest menus in aged care come unstuck.
A menu can carry an Accredited Practising Dietitian’s review and still arrive cold. There can be choices on paper that a resident with communication difficulties is never supported to make. A roster can look adequate until lunch starts and the people who need help to eat discover that everybody is busy doing something else.
That is why hospitality belongs in the boardroom, alongside clinical quality and financial performance, rather than appearing as an ingredient-cost line in the monthly P&L reports. If a resident survey result stays close to 70% for four consecutive years, recording the result is not the same as responding to it.
I want boards to see food satisfaction beside food spend, the stability of their kitchen leadership beside agency costs, and meal rework beside complaints and corrective actions. More than that, I want them to see the full resident response, not one blended, vitamised or mixed percentage.
Has “always liking the food” improved? Can people receiving texture-modified meals make genuine choices? Does the dining room roster give staff time to assist the people who need assistance with feeding that also ensures a hot meal, not a cold one?
Funding adequacy and operational quality are not competing arguments. Underfunding does not make waste efficient, and efficiencies in a kitchen do not make an inadequate funding model adequate.
One year on, what should change?
Government needs to demonstrate that everyday living funding captures the work the standards now require. Providers need to understand where poor service creates preventable cost and where it reflects a genuine need that must be funded. Telling kitchens to “do more with less” is not an operating model, however often it turns up in budget meetings.
Kitchen and care teams need clearer ownership of the dining journey, proper site coverage and a handover system that survives a change of staff. And for residents, the measure of success is beautifully simple: food they enjoy, real choice, safe meals and help when they need it.
The first birthday of Standard 6 is a useful checkpoint. But the Royal Commission started eight years ago, and residents have been repeating the same message since 2022. I am not interested in blaming chefs for a system they did not design, or pretending a change to the funding model fixes what happens between the kitchen door and the resident’s table. I am interested in what providers have actually changed, what it cost, and whether residents have noticed.
So, happy first birthday, Standard 6!
I hope your birthday wishes come true, and that the next Residents’ Experience Survey gives us something better to celebrate than 69% of residents saying they like the food.
And if it doesn’t?
Well, I’m here to help. Culinary Care Group welcomes enquiries from residential aged care providers and independent research collaborators interested in a transparent, resident-centred pilot.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn on November 1, 2026.
