Following up on TRSA’s recent online promotional campaign aimed at encouraging nursing homes to outsource their laundry services, we turned to an operator whose company pioneered this practice nearly 50 years ago. Our goal was to gain insights on how his company has made nursing home laundry—and particularly the processing of residents’ personal clothing—a mainstay of this family’s business.

“The big thing that we find is that you’ve got to educate the customer,” says Keith Luneburg, president of FDR Services Corp., a three-plant healthcare operator based in Hempstead, NY. “Ninety-nine percent of the customers have no idea of the financial ...