The Problem
The average individual living in a disability group home eats less than half the servings of vegetables recommended for a healthy diet. Nutrition in disability group homes is typically high in fat and low in fruits and vegetables, dairy, and whole grains. This can directly contribute to a myriad of digestive and health problems.
As a group, individuals with intellectual or developmental disabilities (IDD) experience significantly poorer health than the general public, often suffering from deficiencies stemming from a poor diet. Part of this is due to the staff at such group homes rarely having the skills or time to prepare meals.
Our Solution
Unlike nursing homes, most group homes do not have formalized nutrition services. Meal planning, grocery shopping, and food preparation are left mostly or entirely up to staff, who often lack nutrition knowledge. This is what prompted our founder, Sarah Short, to imagine a top-to-bottom service that addressed every component of nutrition in a group home setting.
At Whole Nutrition Services, we are working to improve the diet of people living in group homes and supportive living communities, improving their health through our menu-planning and weekly grocery-delivery service.
Our nutrition services include menu planning, grocery shopping, and delivering everything needed to cook and serve balanced, healthy meals. Planned meals are customized to the unique needs of residents and the ingredients are planned to reduce food waste.
We take menu-planning off your plate, saving precious time for facility staff and ensuring that residents’ dietary and nutritional goals are met.
Whole Nutrition Services makes healthy meals possible all year long.
Our Vision
We envision a future where nutrient deficiencies in disability group homes are a thing of the past.
Why Choose Whole Nutrition Services
-
Custom Menu Planning
-
Get access to hundreds of delicious, nutritious recipes.
-
-
Meet Dietary Needs
-
Choose your meals to accommodate allergies and calorie restrictions.
-
-
Grocery Shopping Done For You
-
Leave your staff to do the caregiving they are trained to do. Let us take care of the shopping and deliver the ingredients to you.
-
-
Meals Are Planned
-
Receive the exact quantities of ingredients, making cooking easy with little food waste.
-
-
Reliable Weekly Delivery
-
Have your pantry and fridge stocked weekly with fresh ingredients for three meals a day, seven days a week!
-
-
New Season, New Menu
-
Every season is a new opportunity to incorporate seasonal ingredients so the menu never gets boring.
-
Sarah Short, Our Founder & Nutrition Expert
Sarah's path to founding Whole Nutrition Services began well before she ever wrote a menu plan. She spent several years working in hospital admitting, gaining an early, ground-level view of how healthcare systems serve — and sometimes underserve — vulnerable populations.
That experience led her to formal training in nutrition: Sarah earned a degree in Public Health Management with an emphasis in Dietetics from Oregon State University. She went on to put that training into practice with SNAP-Ed, educating underserved communities on nutrition and healthy eating, and then spent a year with AmeriCorps serving the unhoused community in Atlanta.
Sarah continued building her expertise as a chronic conditions coach, helping clients manage long-term health conditions through sustainable lifestyle change, before launching her own nutrition coaching business focused on personalized, lasting dietary improvement. She later served as a research coordinator on a diabetes research study at Oregon State University, deepening her clinical understanding of nutrition's role in chronic disease management.
Throughout this work, one thing stayed constant: a commitment to improving nutrition access for underserved populations. After observing significant health disparities in group homes — a population whose nutritional needs are too often overlooked — Sarah founded Whole Nutrition Services in 2021 to bring evidence-based menu planning and reliable food access to residents who deserve better.
Sarah often says that food is her love language, and that belief drives every menu, every recipe, and every client relationship at Whole Nutrition Services today.
Contact
Have questions about how Whole Nutrition Services can help improve nutrition in your group home? We'd love to hear from you!