When Lindsey O’Grady closed the 2026 Kitchen Pulse Survey, he wasn’t expecting the results to feel quite so uniform. Fifty aged care kitchens, spread across metropolitan, regional, rural and remote Australia, had answered the same questions. And fifty times over, the answers landed in roughly the same place.
“That level of consistency doesn’t describe individual problems,” O’Grady says. “It describes a sector condition.”
It’s a distinction he keeps coming back to. Not a kitchen-by-kitchen issue that can be solved with a better roster or a slightly larger grocery budget, but something built into the architecture surrounding aged care foodservice itself.
The numbers behind the narrative
The headline figure from the survey, that eighty-six per cent of chefs don’t consistently have the resources to produce the food they want to serve residents, has already drawn attention across the sector. But O’Grady says the supporting data tells an equally important story about where that gap actually sits.
Fifty-six per cent of chefs surveyed described skill levels across aged care kitchens as either mixed or often lacking, an assessment made not by outside auditors but by insiders describing their own industry. Half of respondents said their expertise is most underused in planning and improving the dining experience itself, the very area they’re best placed to influence.
Communication surfaced as a recurring fault line too, with sixty-two per cent of chefs saying the relationship between kitchen and care teams heavily shapes what residents actually experience at mealtimes.
And despite all of this, the emotional core of the survey remained strikingly positive. Ninety-four per centof respondents said they’d recommend aged care as a career choice, though close to half of that group qualified their answer with reservations.
Wages, budgets and a workforce built on goodwill
For O’Grady, the practical pressure points trace back to a handful of structural gaps rather than any single failure. Catering assistants are commonly paid several dollars less per hour than Assistants in Nursing, despite kitchen teams increasingly working across clinical nutrition, allergen management and texture-modified diets alongside standard food preparation.
One respondent linked pay directly to the sector’s staffing shortage, writing that low wages for kitchen support staff were the main reason facilities remained understaffed. Another respondent pointed to budgets set without a clear view of what quality actually costs at the servery, calling for food budgets tied to nutrition outcomes rather than the lowest achievable price.
Training pathways were flagged as similarly out of step with the role as it exists today. O’Grady says many chef leaders are building capability through experience and self-improvement, in environments that don’t leave room to do it properly.
“These are not separate issues,” he says. “They are the same issue viewed from five different angles. The chef leader is capable. The system around them is under-designed for what it’s asking them to deliver.”
A pipeline that runs on accident, not design
O’Grady also points to a less visible problem: the sector’s difficulty attracting culinary leadership talent in the first place. Most experienced chefs, he says, don’t leave hospitality and choose aged care as a deliberate next step. They arrive sideways, through circumstance or a personal contact, rather than through any defined career pathway.
Where strong aged care chef leaders do exist, he argues, they’ve largely built that success without formal support structures behind them, without a clear professional identity to grow into and without sector-wide recognition of what they’ve achieved.
“The talent exists,” he says. “The pathway to it doesn’t.”
Breaking down the silos
If there’s one theme O’Grady keeps returning to, it’s silos. Kitchen and care teams operating separately. Clinical nutrition and foodservice operating separately. Boardrooms and kitchen floors rarely in the same conversation at all.
He’s careful to note that the fix isn’t dismantling those structures, but connecting them: shared governance, joint clinical and foodservice forums, and chef leaders included at decision-making tables they’ve historically been left out of.
“The problem isn’t in any one silo,” he says. “It’s in the distance between them.”
