When a fragmented, hard-to-use menu system was slowing down culinary teams, Otterbein turned to Aline Menus by Grove to make menu management fast, flexible, and frustration-free.
Otterbein SeniorLife is a nonprofit organization serving older adults across Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. With 23 locations, including 14 larger senior lifestyle campuses and nine intimate “small house” communities, Otterbein is committed to delivering exceptional, person-centered care.
Their culinary program is a cornerstone of that experience, with dedicated chefs and directors of culinary at each location empowered to create menus that reflect their community’s unique residents and character.
For years, Otterbein’s culinary teams across all locations managed their menus through a third-party platform that was not built for the way they worked. While the system offered seasonal menu templates, communities that wanted to customize, update, and adapt those menus found the process cumbersome and time-consuming.
When Drew Allen joined as Corporate Director of Culinary in 2022, one of the first recurring themes he heard from his monthly culinary collaboration meetings was clear: the menu platform was a source of ongoing frustration.
“It wasn’t easy for each community to go in there and make changes. People would tell me they were having trouble, and I thought it was user error. But as I reached out to more chefs and directors, they all said, no, this is a problem everyone is having,” said Allen.
Support calls went unanswered or bounced between departments. Even when Allen contacted the vendor directly to escalate the issue, the vendor acknowledged the problem: the platform was built for organizations that simply select a seasonal menu and leave it unchanged. For teams that wanted the flexibility to make their own modifications, it was the wrong fit.
The team also had limited adoption of their PointClickCare (PCC) integration under the previous system. Only a few of Otterbein’s 23 communities had it configured, meaning that for the majority of locations, every new resident admission, diet change, and discharge had to be entered manually by culinary staff. It was repetitive, error-prone work that added up fast.
Allen brought the issue to his culinary collaboration team, and the vote was unanimous: it was time to evaluate other options. After reviewing several vendors, Otterbein selected Aline Menus by Grove.
The decision came down to two things: ease of use and confidence in support.
“They made it seem almost too easy. Every question we asked, they had an answer right away. This is how you do that, this is how you do that. And I’m sitting there thinking, is it really this easy?”
Otterbein’s culinary directors saw exactly what their day-to-day could look like with Aline Menus: going in four or more times a year to update menus for seasonal changes, holidays, and local preferences, with a platform that made each update quick rather than a half-day project.
Otterbein phased the rollout across its communities on a voluntary basis, with a goal of having every location on Aline Menus by the end of the year. From the start, the implementation experience stood out.
When Allen checked in with the chef at Otterbein’s Lebanon, Ohio location, one of the largest campuses in the portfolio, the feedback was straightforward: getting menus loaded into the system was not the ordeal they had expected, sharing that it only took a few days to get setup and started.
After each community completed its initial training, the Aline Menus team followed up directly with Allen to share how the session went:
“After each training, we heard back from the Aline Menus team with an update on how it went. They’ll say, just letting you know we trained this person today, I don’t think you’re going to have any problems. They do that for every single site they train.”
One of the most impactful operational changes came from Otterbein’s decision to require PointClickCare integration across all communities — something Allen could now mandate because Aline Menus made it straightforward to set up.
Before the switch, the majority of Otterbein’s communities had never had automated diet and resident data syncing. Staff had to manually update resident information every time an admission, discharge, or diet change occurred.
With Aline Menus’ PCC integration, those updates now happen automatically. When a nurse updates a resident’s diet in PCC, it flows through to the dining system without culinary staff having to touch it.
When Allen reflects on the biggest difference before and after Aline Menus, the answer isn’t a single metric. It’s the absence of a persistent problem.
“The chefs and directors are happier when it comes to menu things. They’re not frustrated. It used to add so much frustration. New people would come on, and I thought it was just them. But it wasn’t,” said Allen.
In his culinary collaboration meetings since the rollout, Allen hears nearly nothing in the way of complaints about the platform. At one meeting, a single community flagged a question about the production sheet feature. It was a minor issue the Aline Menus team was already working to resolve. Every other location confirmed they had no similar concerns.
The same pattern holds for support. At organizations of Otterbein’s size, friction is expected during a transition involving 23 communities.
“You’d expect somebody to say this is terrible. But I keep asking, are you all sure? And they keep saying yes. I think a lot of it has to do with the customer service they’ve been receiving,” said Allen.
He has already recommended Aline Menus to peers in the industry. His advice to anyone evaluating the switch is grounded in the questions he asked himself before making the decision.
“What are your issues with your current system? And what is the customer service like with your current vendor? For us, both of those things were problems. Aline Menus solved both.”
A new Michigan community coming on board this fall will launch directly on Aline Menus from day one. Allen is already coordinating with the Aline team to have menus loaded and ready before the October kitchen takeover, so the new director of culinary isn’t starting from scratch on top of everything else involved in a transition.
This level of flexibility and support makes directing dining across 23 senior living communities feel manageable, and not frustrating.
Aline Menus is a dining management platform for senior living communities. It offers culinary teams the tools to build, customize, and update menus with ease, while integrating directly with care systems, including Aline Care, to keep resident diet and preference data accurate and current.
From seasonal menu planning to resident-specific dietary needs, Aline Menus is designed to reduce the administrative burden on culinary staff so they can focus on what matters most: delivering exceptional senior living dining experiences to residents.
Managing menus across multiple communities shouldn’t slow your team down. Aline Menus gives culinary directors the flexibility to customize, the tools to stay organized, and a support team that follows through at every step.
Aline
Aline helps senior care operators bring clarity to complex operations by connecting marketing, sales, clinical, dining, and financial systems on one unified platform. Serving more than 9,000 communities, Aline brings together CRM, care, billing, payments, and business intelligence so teams have shared visibility and fewer tools to manage.
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