Meal Or No Meal: Senior Living Operators Debate Role Of Dining In Active Adult

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For years, owners and operators of active adult communities have debated whether any meal services belong in the property type. Now, one senior living company is forging ahead with a new plan to add dedicated dining services to active adult.

The operator is Brentwood, Tennessee-based Vitality Living, which offers or is launching dedicated dining services at its five active adult communities, according to CEO Chris Guay. Vitality plans to operate the venues similar to other eateries in its portfolio of independent living, assisted living and memory care communities, meaning they won’t just be spaces for continental breakfast or rooms where residents can eat food they prepare or bring themselves.

“We operate them so people can come anytime during the day and get food and get something to eat. We’ve tried to expand menus … [and have added] other choices that create some differentiation,” Guay told Senior Housing News.

The baby boomers are bringing a more evolved slate of needs and wants to senior living, and adding meal services can help active adult operators keep up with that evolution. The line between active adult and independent living also is blurring, presenting an opportunity to “lean in” to provide additional services to those residents, starting with dining, he said.

Vitality’s approach stands apart from other active adult operators, such as Greystar, Treplus and Avenue Development, which have shied away from more restaurant-style or grab-and-go dining to keep operational costs – and therefore rental rates – lower and avoid the phenomenon known as acuity creep. Instead, they are giving residents spaces to cook or gather for meals, and they are linking up with companies that can deliver food to them in some cases, as Greystar is doing, according to Michael Levine, senior managing director of real estate, active adult.

Making the case for active adult dining

In 2022, a National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care (NIC) report defined active adult as age-restricted, market-rate, multifamily housing properties that focus on lifestyle and do not provide meals or food credits through general operations. Though they typically didn’t include restaurants a la independent living, active adult properties do often have spaces or clubhouses for breakfast or happy hours.

A 2025 NIC report counted more than 800 active adult properties housing 118,000 units in the U.S. Roughly half of the active adult’s total inventory in the fourth quarter of 2025 opened in the past 10 years and one-third were developed since 2019. In the fourth quarter of 2025, the industry sector carried an average occupancy rate of almost 92%.

Still, the sector is in its early stages, with active adult penetration rates still only as high as about 2% in some markets. That is an indication that there’s more room for new properties that change up the model or offer something new.

Vitality Living over the last five years experimented with dining offerings at its five active adult communities in an effort to try and do just that for new residents.

The operator is heeding lessons learned with its independent living options in order to offset potential operational costs. To that end, the operator is starting small and only offering limited options to start with.

One of its communities in Smyrna, Tennessee, has a bistro kitchen built out for residents, and while it sometimes has similar offerings to the assisted living community on the same property, it primarily offers soups and sandwiches available for purchase. The bistro is now the center of the community and is generating several thousand dollars in “found revenue” each month, according to Guay.

“The residents love it, and what they love about it is they may not want a full meal, but they can drop down and maybe grab a bowl of soup and sit with friends and have a happy hour,” he said. “It’s really helped that community separate itself from traditional multifamily, but also create experience that creates community and socialization.”

He added that community and socialization especially aids residents when they are moving to a higher level of care within the company’s portfolio of communities.

Delving into dining gives Vitality a greater amount of flexibility to experiment with rate increases and offering other services. For-sale a la carte options also give residents more agency over what they eat and when.

“They’re not feeling they’re being forced into a higher level of care setting that isn’t really appropriate for them,” Guay said. “Culinary is the first one to pull people in, because … We all need food. It is something that can start to draw on, and we can show them there’s options here that can be really fun, really exciting, and also support you to age better, but give you a choice.”

The bistro example isn’t the only way Vitality has leaned into dining and culinary services in active adult. Other Vitality communities sling food from a priced menu with different prices depending on the meal plans that residents pre-purchase.

Vitality plans to implement more dining in its growing active adult portfolio as it grows that portfolio to eight communities in 2026.

The case for leaving dining out of the model

As Guay said, food is a big attractor for senior living residents. It could also be a factor that helps them age in place in their units for longer. But that is not always a good thing for active adult properties, which market themselves as locales for active – and usually a little younger – older adults.

According to Levine, Greystar avoids adding dining into its active adult properties, outside of occasionally including venues for continental breakfast. The company is seeking to attract a want-based customer rather than the kind of need-based resident that communities higher on the continuum tend to attract.

Where it did offer some light dining, Greystar found that some residents were taking more food than they could eat at one mealtime and saving it for later, sometimes for other meals. But that doesn’t serve the operator or its residents well.

“People were relying on that breakfast for pretty much their meals for the day. We transitioned and said, ‘We want to try and stay away from the food game and get more into the lifestyle component’,” Levine said.

By avoiding in-house meal services, Greystar also is keeping its operational and staffing costs lower. It’s also sometimes hard to please senior living residents or offer them what they want in dining, especially when there is a difference in what they want and what they are willing to pay for, Levine added.

For other operators like Columbus, Ohio-based Treplus and its five communities, adding dining require building or retrofitting the community with a commercial kitchen, hiring and managing additional culinary and service staff, implementing food safety protocols, inventory management and menu planning. All of that would substantially increase operational expenses, and therefore higher rental rates, according to Arthur Roslovic. That is a problem when factoring in the active adult value proposition of affordability.

“These added costs would need to be passed on to residents through higher rents, which conflicts with the affordable, lifestyle-focused model active adult residents specifically choose,” she said. “Because of the inconsistency in demand and the clear preference against higher costs, we do not believe the investment would deliver meaningful value to residents or the company.”

Indianapolis, Indiana-based Avenue Development also looks at the operational costs associated with dining options, and how it could lead to outgrowing the middle market rates the product type aims toward, according to President and Co-Founder Laurie Schultz. However, that doesn’t mean nutrition isn’t being considered for the segment, and Avenue is looking to incorporate parts of its WellVB, the wellness component of its Viva Bene brand, into active adult options with nutrition counselors or meal programming without having dining on site.

To accomplish this, Avenue is launching a pilot program where it will partner with a third-party food service company offering pre-made meals that residents can sign up for to have delivered directly to them. Avenue is currently vetting what to offer with current residents, and plans to launch the pilot within the next 90 days.

“It’s a lifestyle component. And then again, it has the wellness component,” Schultz said. “We’ve had a lot of feedback from residents that they’re tired of cooking. They’ve done that for decades. They’re more active now than they were maybe even 10 years ago … So having an option that’s a few days a week is really a convenience factor.”

If Avenue were to add in a dedicated dining component to its communities, there is a concern the average age of residents would increase and they would move into active adult, rather than independent living due to the price difference when they would need a higher acuity of care.

Levine added residents themselves have said they don’t want dining options. When Greystar was offering continental breakfast options more across the board, only 10% to 15% of residents were utilizing it as an option in communities that were around 40% occupied. When residents were surveyed, they reported they would rather see the money spent on supplying breakfast going to lifestyle activities, such as happy hours, they would be more inclined to utilize.

Greystar is still looking to partner with local restaurants and offerings for food delivery services and meal planning, similar to what Avenue is doing, alongside working with restaurants to offer discounts to its active adult residents.

“We’re testing different models just to see if anything takes off,” Levine said. “We’re trying to partner with those different pieces, whether it’s food trucks, whether it’s local restaurants, to try and localize ourselves as much as possible.”

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