The Most Underinvested Role in an Aged Care Kitchen isn't the Chef!
- Jul 30
- 4 min read
Ask most providers where their catering training budget goes, and the answer is almost always the same: Chefs, #IDDSI certification, food safety supervision, menu compliance. All necessary and all the right things to invest in. Ask the same providers what training their catering assistants receive, and the answer gets a lot quieter. That gap is one of the biggest blind spots in aged care catering operations today and having spent years building training for this sector, it's the one I'd fix first if I could only fix one thing.
The Role That Actually Touches Every Meal, Every Day
Chefs plan the menu. Chefs cook the dish. But in most aged care kitchens, it's the catering assistant who plates it, delivers it, sits with a resident while they eat, notices what's been left on the tray, and reports back, or doesn't, on what actually happened at the table.
Catering Assistants are the highest-frequency point of contact between the kitchen and the resident. They're often the ones who notice a resident hasn't touched their lunch three days running, who hear "this doesn't taste like it used to" in passing, who see first-hand whether a texture-modified meal is actually being eaten or quietly pushed aside. That's not a peripheral role supporting the "real" catering operation. In a lot of ways, it is the operation, the layer where planning either lands successfully or falls apart.
...Structured training gives people a clear path forward, it turns 'just a job' into a career they can actually see themselves growing in.
RiseUp's Brett Boyle believes that structured training creates clear career development, boosts morale, and recognition shows value.
When people know where they're headed, morale lifts. And recognising that value properly, not just expecting it, is how you build a team that stays.
Why undertraining this role costs more than people think
When catering assistants aren't properly trained, the failure doesn't usually show up as a dramatic incident. It shows up quietly, a resident's meal delivered at the wrong texture level because the assistant wasn't confident enough to double-check it, feedback about a disliked dish that never makes it back to the kitchen because no one taught the assistant that it mattered, a resident who's stopped eating and no one connects the dots until a clinical review flags unplanned weight loss weeks later.
None of that is a chef's failure. It's a training and system failure, sitting exactly at the point where the kitchen's work reaches the resident.
Providers who treat catering assistants as an entry-level, low-training role are, often without realising it, leaving their most important feedback loop unmanaged. These are the people best placed to catch problems early declining intake, texture issues, flavour complaints, changes in a resident's mood around mealtimes and if they haven't been trained to notice, understand and escalate what they're seeing, that information simply doesn't make it back to where decisions get made.
What real development looks like for this role
Good training for catering assistants isn't a shortened, simplified version of chef #training. It's a distinct skill set, and it deserves to be built as one.
It starts with genuinely understanding IDDSI levels and texture modification not just following instructions, but knowing why a level 4 purée needs to hold together the way it does, so an assistant can recognise when something's not right before it reaches a resident. It extends to communication training: how to have a real conversation with a resident about their meal, how to listen for what's underneath a comment like "it was fine," and how to feed that information back to the kitchen in a way that actually changes something. It includes basic nutrition literacy, so an assistant understands why intake matters clinically, not just operationally. And it includes a genuine pathway upward, routes into kitchen roles, supervisory roles, or specialised support roles, so the position isn't a dead end but a starting point.
Providers who invest here see it come back in ways that are easy to measure: fewer texture errors, better resident feedback loops, catering assistants who stay in the role longer because they're growing in it rather than stuck at the bottom of it, and a genuine reduction in the number of "why didn't we catch this sooner" conversations after the fact.
The chef and the catering assistant are one system, not two
The relationship between chefs and catering assistants is often described in hierarchical terms, chef plans and produces, assistant serves and supports. In practice, it works far better as a partnership between two people who each hold half of the same picture. The chef understands what the dish should be. The catering assistant understands what's actually happening when it lands in front of a resident. Neither half is complete without the other, and training that only develops one side of that partnership will always leave the operation weaker than it needs to be.
If the sector wants to close the gap between what's planned in the kitchen and what's actually eaten at the table, catering assistant development can't keep sitting at the bottom of the training priority list. It's not the entry-level role people sometimes assume it is. It's one of the most operationally important roles in the building, and it's time training budgets reflected that.
About RiseUp
We're specialists in Foodservice & Hospitality with a focus in Aged Care. We develop kitchen leaders, we build, culinary experience, compliance and people-leadership skills that turn a good cook into a Head Chef your group can build around. Its about Dining with Dignity!
