The Cinderella Service: Donna Steeden on 28 Years at Quantum Care, Dining Clubs, and Why Care Catering Deserves a Much Higher Profile
Donna Steeden has spent 28 years at Quantum Care, overseeing catering, housekeeping and laundry across 22 care homes — a role she describes as the Cinderella service: invisible when it works, impossible to ignore when it doesn't. In this episode she talks about building long-term supplier relationships over short-term savings, a dining club experience that reduced a son to tears after his first proper family meal with his dementia-diagnosed father, and why the future of care catering means letting residents eat whenever they want.
Donna Steeden came to care catering the way a lot of people do — through a side door. She'd been working across contract catering, hospital catering, restaurants and army camps when she fell into care as a relief chef, travelling between sites and covering homes as needed. She says it quite simply: she never goes through a day in care without feeling she can make a difference. Even if that difference is just making sure one resident has the food they love. That's unlike anything she experienced in her previous career, and it's why she stayed. Twenty-eight years later, she's Support Services Manager at Quantum Care, responsible for catering, housekeeping and laundry across 22 homes — plus the recruiting, inducting, supplier relationships, policies and procedures that hold it all together. She calls it the Cinderella service. Without it, you couldn't run a care home. Most people only notice it when something goes wrong.
In this episode, host Rob Spence asks Donna about the biggest challenges in care catering. She lands where most of her peers do — recruitment and unstable food costs — but the way she approaches both is specific. On recruitment, she's clear that care catering needs to engage people before they're even looking for a job, and that the NACC's Care Chef of the Year competition does that work well. It shows the industry in the light it deserves, demonstrating the skill and talent that go into the role. She sells the hours — no split shifts, no late nights — but what she really sells is the ability to make a personal difference that you simply don't get in most parts of the catering trade. She's also honest that texture-modified cooking requires a particular kind of chef: someone who isn't frightened of it, who has a passion for it. Finding that person is the work.
On food costs, Donna doesn't jump between suppliers when prices shift — she builds relationships and has brutally honest conversations. She was talking to her butcher the week of recording about cheaper cuts that require a different cooking skill but suit the care environment well, and how she could support her chefs to handle them properly. That conversation is only possible because of the trust built over years. She also started with a simple win on food waste: she stopped peeling carrots. Not every answer has to be complicated.
Her view on where care catering is heading is wide-ranging and honest. The flexibility of how people eat now — ordering food at midnight via a phone, eating whenever the mood strikes — will need to be reflected in care settings. She already moved the main meal to the evening at Quantum Care, which was unusual at the time but simply reflected when people were used to eating. Plant-based diets will become a much bigger part of the landscape, and teams need to be building those skills now. And underpinning all of it is something she feels strongly: older people deserve to be seen, supported, and not dismissed. She offers to train carers organisations and hospitals.
She's been trying to have that conversation for years.
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