Improving Resident Quality of Life One Meal at a Time

Chicken teriyaki, orange chicken, pesto chicken pasta, Thai green curry, beef brisket with a cherry glaze, a simple potato salad, and the complex flavours of Western Canadian Chinese food. For many of us our favourite meal conjures a feeling of being home. That feeling is something CapitalCare aims to replicate with a new meal-time experience project.

“Our mandate is to develop recipes that reflect residents’ cultural and ethnic background and improve their mealtime experiences,” said Larry Ostapiuk, project lead for the mealtime improvement project and longtime journeyman cook for over twenty years at CapitalCare Dickinsfield.

In 2025 CapitalCare received a major grant to improve mealtime experiences for residents. The project creates opportunities for residents, families and staff to be consulted in creating new mealtime options and provide feedback on developed recipes. This innovative approach addresses one of the most important issues for our residents: mealtime experiences that reflect their idea of home and community.

The team, comprised of Larry (project lead), Abi (educator), and Karthick (chef), came together in Fall 2025. They focused on improving mealtime experiences by gathering input from the CapitalCare community. They actively engage residents and family members on recipes they might enjoy, spend time developing recipes, and then interact with residents and family members directly to get feedback on those recipes.

Larry (left), Abi (middle) and Karthick (right) pictured at CapitalCare Strathcona.

Some residents are more eager to provide feedback than others.

“One lady uses her iPad to take pictures of all the meals, especially the ones she doesn’t enjoy. She’s exactly the type of person I need, because if the beef stroganoff was made poorly, it’s got a date stamp. I can go back and talk to the people who were in the kitchen,” says Larry.

One result of early engagement with residents and families was learning that residents overwhelmingly prefer familiar dishes.

“We’ve tried offering a Hawaiian potato salad. It had baby potatoes, steamed and cut in half. The dressing was mango and pineapple mixed with tomato salsa and corn salad. It was fantastic. But it’s not Sunday afternoon fried chicken and traditional potato salad, says Larry. “When the residents grew up, they ate simple dishes, like meat and potatoes.”

The group was also delighted to find out having familiar meals meant something particular to life in Western Canada.  “When they went out, they got Chinese food, because every small town in Alberta has a Chinese restaurant. So now we’re looking at making Western Canadian Chinese food,” says Larry.

Abi is working on the second focus of this project: to improve mealtime experience through staff education.

Staff have a reference for all of the dietary needs of residents to ensure they’re served the right food based on medical needs. The group has found that providing residents with choice within these boundaries makes their meals more enjoyable.

“Giving residents a choice is important. This is their home,” says Abi. “When we’re home, we get to choose between cream or milk in coffee, or what kind of tea to drink. So working with staff to introduce more choice for residents will help residents feel more at home.”

Some of the immediate goals within the program are to develop at least 8 new recipes per centre that reflect residents’ cultures and preferences. Having a collection of new recipes also enables centres to potentially transition to a 4 week rotation of meals instead of a 3 week rotation.

The mealtime project team has currently built a backlog of recipes and now they’re looking to adjust the recipes to ensure they’re accessible at all centres. Once they’ve finalized these recipes, they plan to share their findings across CapitalCare as well as  government and across long-term care.

The $575,000 grant is one year into its two-year funding, and the project team has completed the first stage of its work at Strathcona and Kipnes. They’ve recently expanded the project to CapitalCare Dickinsfield and Grandview and are eager to engage with residents there to learn more about their preferences.

By actively engaging residents and families as partners working to improve quality of life, the mealtime improvement project demonstrates CapitalCare’s commitment to creating healthy and sustainable living spaces for our residents. Embedding additional choice and creating spaces where residents can eat delicious and meaningful meals is a core part of Capitalcare’s strategic goals. CapitalCare is excited to expand the mealtime improvement project across our centres and continue engaging with residents and families. The plan is for this to be just the beginning of materials and learnings that can improve quality of life for years to come.