New Player in Senior Dining Centicor Debuts With an Eye Toward Timely Challenges in the Industry
The new Phoenix3 Holdings company has combined a food consulting business and a quality assurance assessment organization while establishing its own procurement operation, offering a blend of expertise to both contract-managed and self-operated senior dining operations. We asked Centicor CEO, Dana Johnston to break it down for our readers.
Centicor, a new Phoenix3 Holdings company, has just launched, offering a suite of services created for senior dining operations. The company is headed up by CEO Dana Johnston, who has decades of noncommercial dining experience, including one decade working with seniors in hospital and senior living settings. Centicor has three main pillars to serve senior dining operations: consulting, quality assurance and procurement.
Johnston compares the nimble nature of the business to a Lego set with many possible configurations and each piece being an area of expertise or service, all depending on the client.
“Picture a Lego model with a lot of pieces, spread out on the floor,” he says. “And then, based on what you hear, you pull together pieces that create what they are looking for, depending on how you put them together.”
The client is the focus from the beginning, Johnston says, calling it “client centricity,” and he often starts with talking about vision. “How does today compare to what the vision is?” he says, “Identify the gaps and then figure out what we’re able to bring to the table. We created this suite of services to empower organization to define their vision, assess their current operations, identify opportunities for improvement, and accelerate their path to success. Our customized solutions in program management, operational consulting, compliance work, and procurement are tapping an unmet need in the market.“
Those gaps can be the result of current conditions in the market identified by Centicor: financial pressures, workforce engagement, the role of technology, and evolving consumer expectations around innovation, variety, quality and service.
Visions get lost in many ways, but “the client may have had that vision, but lacked the resources.” In addition, he adds, “clients don’t always understand their contracts.“
Centicor is not against contract management companies, Johnston stresses, but offers long- or short-term consulting to any operation that has lost that vision and is underperforming.
The consulting part of Centicor is one of three pillars, two of which were made possible by the acquisition by Phoenix3 of two existing senior dining-focused players: Innovative Hospitality Solutions (IHS), an established food and hospitality consulting business, and CrossCheck, a quality assurance assessment organization. These acquisitions, combined with the establishment of Centicor Procurement Services, a supply chain company focused on spend management, combine to form Centicor’s suite structure.
As to how Centicor fits into senior dining operations, Johnston compares it to “almost a district manager,” he says, “who does regular visits, provides coaching, training and monthly financial reviews, making sure the budget is maintained.“
The level of involvement will vary client to client, but, “we correct problems, we bring innovations, provide updates, recommend decor, identify a need to redo the dining rooms or the kitchens,” adds Johnston, who came out of retirement to work on Centicor.
“A client-focused model is something I’d had a passion for and I was tinkering around a little bit and I felt when I left it was unfinished.“
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About the Author
Tara Fitzpatrick, Editor-in-Chief, FoodService Director
Tara Fitzpatrick is editor-in-chief of FoodService Director. She previously served as senior editor for Food Management Magazine.
