Weekly menus for care homes

First of all: make it readable

Many residents have poorer eyesight, read more slowly or read from a wheelchair. A menu that works in a restaurant can be unreadable in a care home corridor. What helps most:

• Large type. In MenuDesign, switch the type size from automatic to manual and increase it until the printed test can be read without effort at the real distance.
• High contrast. Dark text on white paper. No light grey, no text over photos, no coloured backgrounds.
• Clear type. A simple typeface, with no flourishes or calligraphy. Avoid whole paragraphs in capitals too, which are harder to read.
• Few words per dish. “Poached salmon with mash” is understood straight away; a long description isn’t.
• Matt paper. Glossy plastic sleeves reflect the ceiling lights. If you use a sleeve, choose a matt one.

There’s more on this in the guides to menu fonts and menu colours.

What to put on the sheet

• The home’s name and a heading: “This week’s menu”.
• The week: “Week of 19–23 October”. MenuDesign fills it in, or you type your own.
• One column per day, with the main meal’s starter, main and pudding, always in the same order. If the home serves the same way at weekends, add Saturday and Sunday.
• What’s served every day, once: “Bread, water, tea and coffee”.
• The allergens, with their key.
• A footnote with supper, if it’s brief, and the special diets.

Breakfast and afternoon tea are usually much the same every day. If you want to include them, one line in the note is enough.

Lunch and supper

There are two ways to do it:

• In the footnote, if supper is simple and similar each evening: “Suppers: soup, a light main and a dessert”.
• On a second sheet, if supper has its own menu. Duplicate the weekly menu, change the heading to “This week’s suppers” and the dishes. Put both sheets up together.

What doesn’t work is squeezing lunch and supper into the same columns: with ten dishes a day the type has to shrink and you lose what matters most.

Textures and diets

Several diets live side by side in a care home: normal texture, easy to chew, minced and moist, puréed, thickened drinks for residents with dysphagia, diabetic diets, low salt… Which diet and texture each resident has is decided by the clinical team, often a speech and language therapist, and the kitchen follows their instructions and the dietitian’s. In the UK and many other countries, textures are described with the IDDSI framework: drinks from level 0 (thin) to 4 (extremely thick) and foods from level 3 (liquidised) to 7 (regular and easy to chew).

When presenting the menu:

• The menu you put up is the standard one. In many homes the puréed or soft version is the same dish with a different texture; if so, just say so in the note.
• If a diet changes the dishes a lot, make a separate sheet with its name in the heading, as you would for a gluten-free menu.
• No residents’ names next to their diet on the noticeboard or in the dining room. It’s health information.

Choosing tender, easy-to-eat dishes helps everyone: casseroles, soups, boneless fish, minced or slow-cooked meat, ripe or stewed fruit. But what and how much is set by the rules and the home’s own team, not by the menu design. In England, the Care Quality Commission checks that residents’ nutrition and hydration needs are met (Regulation 14), including their preferences and cultural or religious needs; Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own regulators. In the US, nursing homes follow federal CMS requirements for food and nutrition services as well as state rules.

Allergens

A care home kitchen is a caterer like any other: in the UK it must give information on the 14 allergens in the food it serves. With five columns, numbers next to each dish, with the key at the bottom, are the most practical; icons work better when the type is large. For the kitchen, the full allergen matrix is still the reference.

Pay particular attention to soups and purées with milk or cream, stocks and gravies with celery, breaded food and meatballs with gluten and eggs, and custards and mousses.

Where to put it up

• At the dining room entrance, at a height that can be read standing and from a wheelchair.
• On each floor, if some residents rarely come down.
• On the tables, a copy on landscape A4, especially at lunch.
• Enlarged to A3 on the main noticeboard. The landscape A4 PDF can be enlarged at any print shop without distortion.

Reading it aloud in the morning works too: the day’s menu is a topic of conversation and helps residents keep track of the week.

Families read it too

Many families ask what their mum or dad is eating. Sharing the week’s menu answers the question before they ask. Download the PDF or a PNG or JPG image and send it yourself through the home’s usual channel. If some relatives or staff read another language better, MenuDesign can add a second language under each dish.

Design

The template uses the Nordic style: clean type, plenty of space and a single accent colour. Botanical is warmer and still very readable. For this audience, avoid handwritten or very decorative styles, however pretty they are.

Make it with MenuDesign

Open the care home menu template, change the home’s name and the dishes, increase the type size, mark the allergens and download the PDF on landscape A4. Free, no sign-up and saved in your browser.