The Courier Mail: Amanda Gearing

ONE of Australia's largest retirement village operators will force elderly residents to eat reconstituted frozen food every day in a move that has outraged residents.

Sunshine Coast company SCV Group Limited already serves frozen meals to residents of its 16 SunnyCove retirement villages but will extend the frozen food catering to another 90 Village Life retirement villages when it takes over management this month and next month.

Frozen meals based on a monthly repeating menu will be delivered by contractors to each of the rental retirement villages, where the food will be reconstituted on site using steam ovens to cater for more than 5000 elderly residents.

Some components of the meals, such as salads, will be prepared on site.

A Village Life site manager, who did not want to be named for fear of retribution, said she and her husband wanted to continue cooking fresh meals for residents but under the new regime it would not be allowed.

"Managers are walking out," she said yesterday.

"We don't want to leave.

"We love the cooking and were extremely unhappy with what we've been told.

"We were told the food was being brought in because if anybody got food poisoning it would come back on SCV.

"I know residents who left SunnyCove to come to Village Life because of the food and now frozen meals are coming here the residents have handed in their notice to leave."

A spokesman for SCV Group said the cook-freeze method of food preparation being introduced was the same technique used in large hotel chains.

But he said the proposed introduction of frozen food had created anger amongst retirement village residents and managers, who had phoned the company making complaints.

SCV communications manager Ian Minett said cook-freeze meals would be introduced over time into the Village Life sites and only one site would be converting to the new method as soon as it came under new management.

"We have a 97 per cent satisfaction rate on the food in our existing retirement villages and if the food was a problem the resident turnover rate would not be as low as 8 per cent," Mr Minett said.