Identifying demand and new value opportunities for Australian red meat industry

Summary

Existing food delivery systems within residential aged care are challenged in providing all residents with appropriate and desirable options.

This project explored whether a fundamentally different offering of largely red meat based ready meals, and an associated foodservice system could in the future, redress this imbalance. Ready meals have potentially numerous advantages, not only being able to use quality ingredients (i.e. lamb loin and steaks) but provide residents with meaningful meal choice, satisfy more cosmopolitan tastes and in doing so, redistribute the cost of goods sold associated with meal delivery, requiring less skilled labour and kitchen overheads.

Objectives

• Determine the description of 'the cost to feed residents' today and for a future mode (year 2025) aged care service with development of range of red meat dish prototypes. This is to allow for complete transparency in understanding what the true cost of foodservice within aged care is beyond bill of materials, product builds or pre-prepared ready meals heat and serve. This should consider all meals and snacking slots across the facility, including property/plant/equipment and labour operating costs.
• Develop several red meat based dishes and costings that target current 2020 residents pain points currently realised as well as unrealised (e.g. food enjoyment, malnutrition, dysphagia, reduced food waste etc) and iterate based on market insights.

Key findings

• Satisfying the needs of aged care residents, through the delivery of a daily main meal, is a complex and multi-faceted task – there are many criteria that need to be satisfied, from taste enjoyment to providing appropriate nutritional wellbeing.
• Incorporating ready meals alongside an existing foodservice system has been shown to greatly improve residents’ levels of main meal satisfaction, addressing a number of significant pain points. Across four dimensions (choice, enjoyment, experience and overall rating), resident’s opinion of the meals they were served was between ‘ok and good’. Once ready meals were included and they were given a choice, residents satisfaction jumped considerably to ‘good to very good’.

Benefits to industry

As both domestic and global populations age in greater numbers, it is vital that a range of enjoyable, edible and nutritious are accessible. Australian red meat can retain it's place on menu's for this cohort if incorporated into an appropriate food delivery system and format.

MLA action

Final report to be published on the MLA website and shared with interested parties.

Future research

• Success requires a staged and targeted approach to rolling out ready meals.
• Ready meals need to be further developed to optimise their adoption, addressing new issues. Ready meals need to be further tested within an aged care facility to prove they can deliver on all dimensions including, resident’s acceptance, ease of implementation and commercial viability.