The hidden cost of meal choice under Support at Home

By James Norfor, CEO and Co-Founder, b2care

Support at Home was designed to give older Australians more control. More say. More flexibility.

It has delivered on that promise.

What it has not delivered is a simpler operating model for providers.

Choice is no longer a compliance feature or a marketing add-on. It is a competitive lever. Clients expect it. Families demand it. And increasingly, they will change providers to get it.

But unmanaged choice carries a cost. And right now, that cost is being absorbed quietly inside provider operations.

Choice is winning the battle for clients

Ask someone receiving Support at Home what matters day to day. It is rarely funding models or policy architecture. It is practical questions. What am I eating tonight? Can I choose it? Can it arrive when I need it?

Meals are not trivial. They sit at the intersection of dignity, independence and wellbeing. They also happen to be high-volume, recurring transactions.

In a competitive market, providers that restrict options risk losing clients. Those that accommodate personal preferences build loyalty and referrals.

Brenda from Perth recently contacted us because her mother had stopped eating. Their previous provider would not allow alternative meal suppliers. “She was bored,” Brenda said. “The meals were just a different protein in the same sauce every day.” They changed provider.

That decision was not about menu variety. It was about experience. And experience now drives churn.

Choice has become a retention strategy.

Where the friction actually sits

From the client’s perspective, offering choice should not be complicated.

From an operational perspective, it often is.

Meals touch multiple parts of a provider’s system: client setup, supplier onboarding, ordering, budget tracking, compliance, invoicing and reporting. When choice expands, complexity usually expands with it.

Care coordinators are already managing large caseloads, care planning, client communication and regulatory requirements. Layer on fragmented ordering processes and multiple supplier relationships and the friction builds quickly.

Consider the cumulative impact of small tasks:

• Checking what a client ordered
• Confirming compliance and budget alignment
• Navigating multiple supplier websites
• Following up discrepancies
• Reconciling invoices

None of this is high-value care work. Yet across dozens of clients, week after week, it consumes hours. That time translates into cost. It also shapes workforce satisfaction.

Are we designing roles that create value, or roles that reconcile transactions?

That is not a clinical question. It is a system design question.

The choice paradox

Support at Home has expanded expectations around choice, access and responsiveness. At the same time, compliance obligations and financial scrutiny have increased.

The sector now faces a structural tension. The system aspires to honour consumer choice. The operational realities push providers toward standardisation.

This is not new. In my previous career as a Chief Procurement Officer, the challenge was consistent across industries: how to handle volume and reduce costs while preserving choice, without burying teams in administration.

The solution was rarely about restricting options. It was about redesigning the order-to-pay process.

When transactions are supported by clear workflows, automation and visibility, efficiency rises and costs fall. Staff engagement improves because their work shifts from reactive administration to proactive value-adding activity.

The same principle applies in home care.

Meals as a lens into margin pressure

Meals are simply a visible example of a broader issue.

High-volume, low-complexity transactions are often where margin quietly erodes. They do not trigger alarms. They accumulate.

If providers continue to bolt new choices onto legacy processes, administrative burden grows. Costs increase. Coordinators feel stretched. And the commercial model tightens further.

But if those transactions are consolidated, automated and visible in real time, choice and efficiency stop competing with each other.

A marketplace model, where multiple suppliers sit within one ordering and invoicing system, is one way to address that structural gap. Client budgets can be transparent. Compliance can be embedded. Invoicing can be streamlined.

The principle is what matters: centralise complexity so that choice can expand without multiplying administration.

When that happens, care coordinators become proactive rather than reactive. Conversations shift from “we need to fix this” to “here is what is working well”. That is where value is created.

Delivering on the promise of reform

Support at Home raised expectations. Those expectations will not retreat.

Providers that thrive in this environment will not be the ones offering the narrowest menus. They will be the ones that redesign their systems to absorb choice without eroding margin.

The future of home care will not be defined by how much choice is available. It will be defined by how intelligently providers design the infrastructure behind that choice.

Because reform did not just empower participants. It transferred complexity to providers.

The question now is whether that complexity is allowed to accumulate, or deliberately engineered out.