Rich Daehn: Culinary leader

At a Glance

Accomplishments

Rich Daehn has enhanced the foodservice operations at Benedictine Health System by:

Rich Daehn, corporate director of culinary services for Benedictine Health System (BHS), in Duluth, Minn., is definitely a think-outside-the-box kind of guy. How else would you describe a man who believed that long-term care foodservice directors could improve their operations by going to Disney World?

He has fostered a spirit of independence by giving his 40 culinary directors the freedom to write menus unique to their facilities. He has encouraged them to be competitive by creating a type of cook-off that can reward their units with up to $15,000 in capital funds. By partnering with vendors, he has been able to provide training to all staff to maintain the level of quality guests—Benedictine doesn’t use the terms “patients” or “residents”—have come to expect.

The result has been skyrocketing customer satisfaction scores, from 63% when he began to more than 90% today.

Related:Confessions of Rich Daehn

“My role is to lead, inspire and drive the culinary excellence initiative at Benedictine,” says Daehn, who became corporate director two years ago after serving in that role on a consulting basis for four years. “All of our buildings operate off of select menus, and we have encouraged the use of more scratch and speed-scratch cooking. We have concentrated on the dining atmosphere as well.”

Mary Mlynczak, culinary director at St. Anne of Winona, in Minnesota, says that Daehn’s leadership “has made me think about all the possibilities there can be in long-term care.”

“He is always asking us, ‘why can’t you?’ ” Mlynczak explains. “He tells us to forget about what healthcare has been and focus on what we want it to be.”

She adds that Daehn’s passion and vision can be infectious, pointing to the situation at her facility as an example.

“We started putting linens on the table, and that led to someone suggesting we go with glass plates,” Mlynczak says. “We started dressing up the tables more, with fresh flowers and the like, and the whole community got on board. Then someone suggested we needed a new floor, and so we were able to get a wood-grain floor, and just like that the whole dining area has been transformed.”

Dale Thompson, the now-retired CEO of BHS, says of Daehn: “Hospitality is just in his DNA. We have learned so much from him because he doesn’t know any other way to do things. He has such a passion for [the impact] culinary services can have on the quality of life.”

Unlikely discovery

Daehn, who grew up in Lake Geneva, Wis., started his foodservice career as a dietary aide because “I needed a job in high school.” Adapting well to the long-term-care environment, he was running a 50-bed personal care home by the time he was 19. He earned a bachelor’s degree in management from Upper Iowa University and an MBA in leadership from Aurora University. His career path eventually brought him to Mount Carmel, a 600-bed nursing home in Milwaukee.

Thompson explains that BHS discovered Daehn “in the midst of chaos” several years ago when the organization was asked by Wisconsin’s governor to see what it could do to turn around Mount Carmel, which was out of compliance in a number of areas.

Arriving at the nursing home at 5:30 a.m. on the day they were to meet staff, Thompson and his team encountered Daehn, who greeted them with a champagne fountain flowing with grape juice, fresh pastries and other welcoming amenities. As Thompson learned more about Daehn and his philosophy about the role of foodservice in long-term care, the more enamored he became. He asked Daehn to work with Benedictine as a consultant—which Daehn did for four years while also fulfilling his job at Mount Carmel.

“Partly because of BHS’s growth, the consultancy was requiring more and more time from me and it was becoming difficult to do two positions,” Daehn recalls. “So two years ago they created this position for me, and I told them I’d accept as long as I could stay here in southern Wisconsin.”

The organization for which Daehn works is an interesting one. From a culinary perspective, each facility operates independently, setting its own menus.

“That is on purpose,” Daehn explains. “We don’t want a standardized menu at all. We want the menus to be specific to each community. Now, that can create some complications because we can’t just say from the corporate office that this is what you are going to do.”

Second, although BHS manages 40 campuses across seven Midwest states, it doesn’t own all of them. In some cases BHS has been hired to manage certain aspects of a facility.

“It makes things a bit tricky because we may be one of three different partners that are involved with the operation,” Daehn adds. “So our challenge is to convince everyone involved that this is the way to manage culinary and this is the expectation we have.”

Going to Disney World

Daehn has worked through these challenges by focusing on a model that is decidedly atypical—by pulling “stunts” like leading a team to Disney World. Two years ago, he took eight directors to the Magic Kingdom to see how Disney treats its customers.

“I wanted to take them to an industry that had nothing to do with healthcare,” he explains. “I wanted them to learn all about Disney’s customer satisfaction initiative and look at how we could take some of that back to our operations.”

The casting tool that Disney World uses was one takeaway. “Our culinary directors now evaluate their new hires for one year,” Daehn says. “The goal is to make sure that they are ‘cast’ in the right positions for them and being given the support to do the kind of work we need them to do.”

Another, unexpected, lesson learned from the Disney trip was that equipment—or, rather, the lack of—needn’t be a hindrance to great culinary performance. “We all expected to walk into kitchens that were state-of-the-art, with all of the equipment you could ever want,” he recalls. “What we walked away with was that they are doing mass volumes of production using the same kind of equipment we are using. They came home saying, ‘We can do what we need to do with what we have.’”

Daehn also has instilled camaraderie and competition among his 40 directors through a program called Taste of Benedictine. At the event, held during BHS’s annual leadership conference, directors create dishes that are served at a reception—all the while competing against one another for up to $15,000 in capital dollars for their facilities.

Taste of Benedictine is set up as a food show. Culinary teams submit applications in which they describe the menu item they would like to make, and the best submissions are chosen for the event. Last year 18 teams were selected. Teams spend up to a day and half “backstage” preparing their dishes. Three hours before the food show opens, they present their dishes to the judges. The best dish wins $15,000 in capital dollars for that team’s facility; second place receives $10,000 and third place gets $5,000.

“We’ve done four of these and it has created a kind of camaraderie among the teams, even as they are competing,” Daehn says. “They get additional ideas, they see additional preparation methods and they share ideas.”

Such idea generation and collaborative thinking are essential, he notes, as long-term care shifts gears in the way it treats residents.

“We’re moving away from the skilled model to more concentration on the transitional care model and independent model, skilled care actually being a smaller portion of that,” he says “It’s my job to help our culinary directors be able to handle the more independent guest, with more of the baby boomer-type mentality in how they want to see their meals. ”

One representation of this changing dynamic will be at Interlude, a higher end 50-bed transitional facility, in Plymouth, Minn. Scheduled to open in October, it is a partnership between Allina Health, BHS and Presbyterian Homes.

“We will be doing a different model there,” Daehn says. “Our brand will be a hybrid of the farm-to-table model, with a bistro on site as well as fresh-baked items daily. There will be more of a destination dining feel to it.”