Food That Won’t Kill

Taste doesn’t matter in food. At least when it comes to government-reimbursed food. 

We started Stock Pot with the belief that if we could deliver better food at the same price as incumbents, we would beat our competition. Call it the Toyota strategy. Better car, same price. The result? While we have had good growth with smaller, innovative institutions, large competitive bids are still regularly won by vendors providing mediocre food. What gives?

Simply put, we don’t care if people like the food and eat it. Taste is conspicuously absent from any consideration in vendor selection. 

Take the example of seniors. We remember this invitation-to-bid presentation by a large senior organization. On a rainy morning in Massachusetts, the nutrition manager in charge of the Request for Proposal for this organization waxed poetic on the criteria used for selecting a vendor. We reviewed some exquisite standards of nutrition regulation, including the need for an orderly parade of colors in the vegetables being served (“don’t forget purple”). We discussed why the minimum protein content for the week (target of 15 oz.) needs to be larger than the sum of the minimum content per day (5 days times 3 oz. would be too simple, so minimum per day is 2.5 oz., thereby requiring that other day be higher), leading to a discussion of the rich alternatives offered by the possibility of alternating days with 2.5 and 3.5 oz.  

The presenter then proudly said that the organization had run a survey asking seniors what they thought. I whipped out my notebook, ready for useful pointers on what seniors like. We learned that seniors prefer answering physically printed questionnaires to responding by computer (70% vs. 30%). They also prefer receiving food to not receiving food, which, the presenter explained, shows how good a job the senior organization is doing (“that food is valued”, 95% like receiving food). Seniors also enjoy talking with the driver that delivers the food, particularly if the driver speaks Spanish if they are Hispanics. And no, they do not care to see a printed menu with the nutritional details spelled out for them.

By then, I had become a little annoyed. I asked whether the questionnaire had questions about the food. Do they like soup? Do they prefer mashed potatoes or pasta to rice? Beef to chicken? I sat in the back of the room and many vendors turned back to me with an amused smile that said: “look at this poor idealistic fellow who thinks food matters”. One suggested we should consider lobster or caviar, haha!

The presenter was briefly silent, went back to the slide listing the survey questions and said: “let me see, I think there was a question in there about the food”. Slightly embarrassed, she admitted there was no such question, except perhaps for the one asking seniors whether they preferred receiving food to not receiving food, triggering another round of self-congratulation.

Our conclusion from this presentation? The rules of nutrition need to be obsequiously observed, down to the purple vegetable, but when it comes to food quality, the standard is that food should not kill the seniors that eat it.