One On One: Recent Episodes
Food Management
Each month the Food Management editorial team hosts in-depth, intimate conversations with industry icons and thought leaders on topics including hiring, new concepts, consumer trends, management and menu development.
NYU’s Chef Tati helped students through the pandemic boredom with her fun Tuesdays with Tati social media series, in which she demonstrated food “hacks” that could be easily done with dining hall items. Now, as summer heats up and New York City begins to come back to life after a long 18 months, Tatiana Ortiz prepares for innovative future menus, even as uncertainty still plays a role, especially on the catering side of things.
Ortiz describes early life in Columbia, her NYC roots and how flavors from around the world can combine into entirely something new depending on the chef. When Ortiz first came to live in New York as a teen, her persistence got her started in catering jobs which led to her current position at NYU. Preferring to go the extra mile on the job, Ortiz is optimistic about the rest of year, but cautiously so. She’s waiting to see what happens next, honing her culinary skills to nourish the campus community no matter what the future may hold.
Students at Indian Creek High School in Indiana’s Nineveh-Hensley-Jackson United School Corp. district have been raising a number of beef cattle given to the school by the Creek Cattle Co. When they reach maturity this summer, Creek Cattle will process them into meat that the school meal program will then serve to students. The initiative thus has both an educational component for not only the students involved with taking care of the animals but others who will benefit from the experience to learn more about where food comes from while also knowing that the meat they are eating is from cows that were well cared for during their lives. In this FM One On One podcast interview, Carol Schaaf, director of food service for the district, talks about the school-raised beef program, how she plans to use the resultant product and the benefits in general of this and related farm-to-school initiatives.
Pennsylvania-based Kendal, which operates over a dozen CCRCs around the country, is in the process of developing Enso Village, a $300 million continuing care retirement community in Healdsburg, California, in conjunction with Greenbrier Development and the San Francisco Zen Center. The company describes Enso Village as “a zen-inspired life plan community [that will] focus on mindful aging, the joys of nature, environmental stewardship, contemplative care and healthy life choices for adults 60+”. As part of that focus, Kendal is partnering with Greens, a landmark vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco’s Fort Mason district. Greens will work with Kendal on recipe development and fostering and expanding relationships with area growers as a big focus of the dining program will be on locally sourced, fresh product. In this FM One On One podcast interview, Ben Butler, Kendal’s vice president of culinary services, talks about Enso Village and the plans for its dining component. He notes that as planning for the community proceeds, he will be looking for an executive chef with the experience and expertise to manage its very specialized dining program.
We talk about campus life as we emerge from the pandemic, Jamaican food like oxtail and dumplings, how college students’ eating habits are evolving and how a dining team can keep it together and even thrive during stressful times. One secret? No drama.
It seems there’s a lot of information out there for the ergonomics of desk work, but back-of-the-house foodservice advice is harder to find. We spoke to Food and Nutrition Coordinator Mary Schutz about her project to help everyone ditch bad habits and move better in order to feel better. This is a major step toward avoiding injury doing everything that must be done to keep a foodservice operation up and running.
Schutz says you can never take away the physical work that goes into this job, but there are scientifically proven steps everyone can take to make things safer, more efficient and just smoother for those showing up to work every day.
We take a deep dive into the types of injuries that can occur and Shutz shares with us some of the solutions that she and her team are currently putting into practice after working with experts in workplace ergonomics.
Director of Food and Nutrition Aaron Smith is designing menus based on geographic populations throughout the city of Seattle and partnering with teachers for lesson-based menu items in his second year at the district.
Karen Bala, director of design for Boston-based architectural firm Dyer Brown, discusses recent changes in workplace culture and how that affects the design and infrastructure needs of corporate dining spaces.
Johns Hopkins University had the benefit of the hospital’s health and safety team, giving them time during the pandemic to listen to students and plan the future.
Jill Martin, director of nutrition services for the University of California San Diego Health, talks about introducing more plant-based dishes into retail and patient menus in healthcare foodservice.
At one of the largest school districts in the country, Crystal Cooper, executive director for Nutrition Support Services, is determined to feed every student regardless of economic background.
On January 6th, rioters invaded the Capitol complex in Washington, DC, a traumatic experience for anyone caught up in the event. One of them was Fred Johnson, who serves as senior area general manager for Sodexo at the U.S. House of Representatives, overseeing 13 dining outlets across five buildings. However, Johnson is no inexperienced civilian in over his head in a crisis, but a U.S. Air Force veteran who had undergone combat survival and prisoner-of-war training as well as culinary training at the CIA in California before becoming an Air Force chef, where one of his assignments was to cook for President Barack Obama on Air Force One. After leaving the Air Force, he joined Sodexo, first serving the Marine Corps at its facilities in Quantico, Va., before taking up his current role at the House of Representatives. Somewhat counter intuitively, this tough military vet is also a skilled fruit basket carver and has become known over the last four years for creating gingerbread replicas of the Capitol building. However, it wasn’t his culinary or artistic skills that allowed him to deal with the Jan. 6 crisis. Here’s his story of what went down that day, along with some background on the dining operations he oversees.
A candid look back at what last year meant to senior dining, and how day by day, things are still changing. We talk with Roger Least, corporate director of dining for Brightview Senior Living, a self-operated community of 42 locations on the East Coast.
Ghost kitchens aren’t just for restaurants anymore now that Chartwells Higher Education has introduced the concept at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD).
The program—which began last year—was a response to the pandemic’s limitations on foodservice much the same as restaurants who turned to the service. However, Chartwells and UTD’s venture into ghost kitchens provided much more to the students and staff than a traditional ghost kitchen.
Pam Stanley, director of food and retail services at UTD, explained that it gave students more flavorful food options from just one centrally located on-campus site rather than having the cuisines spread out. This centralization also gave the culinarians a chance to innovate in one kitchen and work together to create a secret menu with new food items. And, if we’ve learned anything from quick-service restaurants, people love a secret menu.
With the help of delivery robots and Boost Mobile digital software, Stanley and her staff were able to bring food to students safely while allowing the culinarians to feel the freedom to create interesting meals again and save space on a quickly expanding campus of 35,000.
And the ghost kitchens at UTD are just the beginning.
The pilot was run at UTD during the pandemic but had actually been in the works before COVID, Andrea Johnson of Chartwells Higher Education explained. The closing of virtually every foodservice center during the early months of 2020 only sped up the innovation from Chartwells, which is quickly growing the ghost kitchen program at universities across the country.
Hear Stanley and Johnson explain the ghost kitchen program at UTD and more innovations they have worked to develop at the campus over the past year.
Remote ordering has been around for years. In the onsite dining world, its major penetration has been in the college market, where there is a ready-made population of tech-savvy customers already used to living online. However, cultural trends, financial pressures and—of course—the coronavirus pandemic have prompted more operations across all segments to look at this and other technology options. Johns Hopkins Health System in Baltimore is one major healthcare system looking into the potential of remote-order technology to provide enhanced customer service while keeping costs in check. The health system’s in-house dining program recently initiated deployment of a remote-order system based on the GrubHub platform targeted at security guards, a customer segment that obviously has to be around 24 hours a day. As an added benefit, the initiative is designed to encourage the guards to choose healthy meal options. In this Food Management One On One With podcast, Dr. Angelo, Mojica, senior director of food & culinary services for Johns Hopkins Health, talks about this initiative and further extensions of the remote-order technology being planned for deployment later this year.
Sung Kim, a business-school alum of SUNY Binghamton, has nurtured a growing fast-casual concept with roots in his college days and a future he hopes will go far beyond there.
The idea for Chick-N-Bap came about from Kim’s dual ideas and feelings (and foods) that represent the duality many immigrants feel. Kim grew up in Queens, N.Y., where the late-night favorite was and is chicken over rice with a zippy white sauce. He took that idea, infused it with his own Korean cultural touchstones and made it into a super viable and growing concept on several campuses, with more to come.
He talks to us about franchising, working with dining departments and the way new menu items come about. Especially interesting is how Chick-N-Bap is getting in on the so-called chicken sandwich wars. He’s also adding salsa for another element in an already mash-tastic flavor profile. Kim has some great ideas and it’s inspiring to experience the energy that he’s bringing to one of the toughest businesses in one of the toughest times.
Lora Gilbert, senior director of Food and Nutrition Services, and Jamila Adams, menu and nutrition senior administrator, of OCPS explain how they've managed to feed kids during the pandemic while keeping options exciting.
Hospital dining has the power to help patients heal beyond what they eat while they are there—after they leave the hospital and are trying to make better food choices on their own. With the coronavirus pandemic continuing, getting well and staying well are more important than ever.
On today’s episode of One On One With, Food Management speaks with Cordialis Msora-Kasago, MA, RDN, and her work with Sodexo’s healthcare division. We focus specifically on coronavirus patients, because it’s still a problem, even as we start the new year. And the dietetics community is learning new things every day, so it’s good to keep up with any new ideas.
Msora-Kasago is an expert not only on healthcare foodservice for patients while they are in the hospital, but also how hospitals can reach out into the community and make an impact on nutrition and overall wellness, especially in Black and brown communities where inequalities like food deserts/access to healthy food is just one obstacle.
Lisa Schairer, managing director of Cura Hospitality, a member of the Elior North America, spoke with Food Management about initiatives from Cura-operated foodservice operations like mini grocery stores to margarita carts.
Cameron Schauf, director of campus dining services & auxiliary operations at the University of Rochester, reviews how the dining program fared over the fall and what it plans for the spring.
With 2020 in our rearview mirror, Food Management editors Tara Fitzpatrick and Holly Petre talk about a few of the highlights from Tara’s trend prediction story. Delving into how the past coronavirus pandemic year has changed the onsite food service industry and our tastes and cravings, this locally sourced discussion wanders into the streets of New York (where Holly is based) and then hits the meandering country roads of the Midwest (Tara’s home).
We also talk about how important the effects of movements for equality and inclusion have been on the industry, and the way people are interacting with each other now. While things look uncertain still for the food world (and the world in general), here are a few trends worth paying attention to, ordering from your local dining spot and pondering with for a while.
Link to 2021 trends: https://www.food-management.com/food-beverage/food-trend-predictions-which-flavors-ingredients-and-menu-items-will-2021-serve-hot
Bertram Weber, director of food & nutrition services for the Minneapolis Public Schools, talks about how his department is approaching getting meals to kids while the district is in full remote-learning mode, and about his involvement with the ScratchWorks program that seeks to promote more scratch cooking in K-12 meal programs.
On this episode of One On One With, we catch up with Van Sullivan, executive director, Faculty Student Association at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, N.Y. Sullivan and the CulinArt dining team have been making it work this year, and we talk a bit about what operations have been like for the school and also the hospital associated with it. Since Sullivan has had such an interesting career—working at UMass as his first college foodservice job—we talk about how he got there. And also, Sullivan has an incredible wealth of knowledge about the different food neighborhoods in Queens, N.Y., where he lived for years.
Sullivan has found that his sense of adventure prepared him for this year, also his determination. When it comes to sustainability and doing the work there, he’s firm that “you’re either in or out.” That means even though the pandemic forced a return to disposables, he’s kept up with finding better alternatives and is planning for the future constantly. In terms of tech and communications, Sullivan thinks the pandemic has streamlined a lot of unnecessary noise.
Mara Fleishman of the Chef Ann Foundation talks about the ScratchWorks organization and its initiatives to get more scratch cooking into schools.
The corporate chef of the onsite giant shares insights into how consumer tastes are changing, and also how they’re staying the same.
Kristin Groos Richmond, CEO of prepared meal provider Revolution Foods, talks about the company’s initiatives to support K-12 meal programs during the coronavirus pandemic and the impact on those activities of the recent USDA extension of school meal waivers.
As one of Food Management’s College Power Players with one of the largest dining programs at a U.S. universityCornell University faced a significant challenge when welcoming students back for the fall semester. How do you feed them all safely while protecting employees?
Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., closed one of its many dining halls, Oakenshields, in September and later announced it would remain closed through the end of the semester. Located in the central campus, Oakenshields is the dining hall closest to where almost every class is held. However, with the COVID pandemic foot traffic at the college’s once-busiest dining hall is not down to between 20 and 20 people each day.
The solution: satellite meal pickup locations. These locations across campus allow students to pick up meals on the go when dining halls are limited with capacity restrictions, allowing them to pay with dining dollars.
To help stem the flow of traffic and meet capacity restrictions in dining halls, Cornell partnered with reservation app OpenTable for a beta test. The new version of the app allows students to make reservations in each dining hall for meals whether they’re dining in or taking out.
What happened to the vast unused building that was once Oakenshields? Dustin Cutler, executive director of dining services, and his team turned it into a test kitchen training staff, testing out new recipes and experimenting while keeping every member of the dining program on staff during slower business.
Listen to the full interview with Dustin Cutler to learn more about the new technology and fall dining plans.
Laura Knight recalls a moment, early in the pandemic, when disinfectant wipes were impossible to come by. A Morrison Healthcare associate got her hands on a case of industrial-sized wipes, then enlisted her husband to help cut them up, pack them into plastic zip bags and send them to the team members who had to get on airplanes that week.
Even now, air travel seems iffy to many of us, but Knight has been living in airports and planes in order to connect with Morrison hospital accounts across the country. She says she’s been inspired by her team of courageous employees, and adds, “I would say ‘fearless,’ but that’s not true,” she says. “We all have fear, but we have to face it.”
Facing fear, uncertainty and all the challenges of this year are the topics of conversation for our talk with Knight. She also gives us a window into the future, as she predicts technology will take on exponentially greater roles in the healthcare foodservice space as time goes on. Balancing all that with the hospitality and human touch aspect of the industry, she’s a great example of how to use the pandemic as a way to come back stronger.
American Dining Creations (ADC) is an FM Top 50 firm that was growing steadily and nearing $200 million in annual revenues when the coronavirus pandemic struck earlier this year. Like just about every other dining provider in onsite foodservice, the company had to adapt to the new realities, which included not only restrictions on how food can be served but also on accommodating a newly nervous—and reduced—customer base. Compounding the problem for ADC is the reality that its Greens & Grains salad bar concept was its flagship brand, a mostly self-serve platform offering trendy healthy pick-your-own options that was impossible to continue in the new environment. So the company did a pivot and transformed Greens & Grains into a modified packaged format that still offers diners customization options but in a way that meets regulatory and psychological safety requirements. The modified salad bar concept was piloted in several of ADC’s corporate dining client locations and received significant positive response, including café revenue increases and with Greens & Grains generating almost half the business in some locations. We spoke with ADC’s vice president of marketing, Nick Salvagni, about the evolved Greens & Grains concept and the other ways the company has adapted its operations to meet the current environment.
Reginald Ross was named president of the School Nutrition Association (SNA) in July without the traditional fanfare that comes with the yearlong appointment, but as the first man to serve in the position since the 1970s, he had an agenda, even while taking the reins during the pandemic.
Ross joined One On One this week to discuss the goals for SNA during his tenure. The biggest priority for the association was the extension of meal waivers through Aug. 31, 2021 to allow schools to serve every child in the new unconventional ways.
This podcast was recorded mere hours before the USDA announced the continuation of school meal waivers through Sept. 30, 2021, even further than Ross and the SNA had hoped for.
While Ross spoke about the importance of the meal waiver extension, he also explained how SNA is training educators and foodservice “heroes” (his word, though we have used the same phrase here at Food Management) to advocate for themselves at Capitol Hill and care for their students with a series of webinars and (when it was legal) in-person training.
Ross also spoke about his own history as a former quick-service restaurant worker and owner before eventually joining the ranks of school nutrition in Charlotte, N.C., where he serves as a School Nutrition consultant for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction and helps with 41 school meal programs.
Charles DeLeva, executive chef at St. Luke’s University Health Anderson Campus, talks about how produce from an organic farm located on hospital property benefits his dining program and his customers.
At Maryville College in Tennessee, General Manager James Dulin of Metz Culinary Management began meeting with university administrators back in early May to discuss benchmarks and health guidelines, and to develop a detailed campus dining plan. Procedures were adapted to correlate with recommendations from the CDC and state of Tennessee and were designed to maintain safe conditions for both the dining staff and for customers while providing the Maryville community with as appealing and convenient a foodservice program as possible. Maryville is typical of smaller colleges and universities, which have tended to be more open to holding in-person classes than larger public universities according to a recent analysis. Smaller schools also tend to have closer relationships between staff and students than larger, more impersonal institutions, and this intimacy has traditionally been one of the benefits of attending such a school. Unfortunately, it is also one of the potential casualties of a COVID-ravaged world that requires social distancing and touchless transactions, so the Maryville/Metz dining team has had to work hard to ensure that its connections with its customers are maintained as much as possible under the circumstances. In our podcast interview with Dulin, we talked about how the school’s dining hall and retail outlets have been balancing service and safety considerations in the month since classes began, the menu adjustments that this year’s COVID-imposed changes have required, the protocols the dining team established for students wishing to dine in and the school’s continued commitment to sustainability through the use of reusable takeout containers, among other issues.
Georgia has been in the news since early August when some K-12 school districts returned to school and were immediately closed as hundreds of coronavirus cases were confirmed during the first few weeks of in-person learning. Cobb County Georgia, the suburban county next to Atlanta, was not one of those districts because the district’s superintendent selected not to resume in-person classes until the county’s infection rate is 200 cases per 100,000 people.
Now, that threshold has been met, and the district will reopen schools Oct. 5 for optional in-person learning barring any rise in cases of COVID-19. But, thanks to the USDA, students remaining at home to remote learn can still receive their meals on Wednesdays in Cobb County.
The USDA reversed its earlier position on meal waivers and decided to extend summer meal flexibilities through Dec. 31, 2020, altering plans districts were making to live without the flexibility of the waivers.
For Emily Hanlin, executive director of food & nutrition services for Cobb County Schools, that means looking at the program’s offerings, including a mobile preorder app that had caused some issues with Spanish-speaking families.
Listen to the full podcast to hear how Cobb County is reopening schools and the district’s plan for the rest of the year.
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On this episode of One On One With, we find out how Teasley has faced the challenges of the last few months (he found a way to keep COVID-19 patients’ food hot while in disposable containers, for one). Teasley talks about the positive culinary culture at UNC Health, something he’s being careful to preserve. The Black Hat Chefs training program is continuing as a backbone for promoting from within by teaching bedrock culinary skills, so we talk about that, too. And Teasley is passionate about dispelling that somehow-still-persistent hospital food negative image. He also lets us know his impressions on North Carolina barbecue, as someone coming from Atlanta.
During a normal National Hockey League (NHL) season, the UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex is a busy, bustling place where the league’s Pittsburgh Penguins congregate, practice and train. Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic put a temporary stop to the 2019-2020 NHL season this past spring. When players around the league were allowed to re-enter their respective practice facilities on June 8 to begin Phase 2 of the league’s Return to Play plan, one of the many changes in protocol was that any meals provided to the players had to be individually packaged in to-go containers for out-of-facility consumption. All of this was a challenge for Executive Chef Geoff Straub, his sous chefs, Bob Schiffhauer and Chris Culp and Director of Dining Amanda Figurski of management company Parkhurst Dining, the division of Eat ‘n Park Hospitality Group that operates the onsite dining service for the Penguins players and staff at the Lemieux Center. They put together a plan that respected the COVID-imposed restrictions while keeping players fed with nutritious meals both during the lockout and after play resumed. We spoke with Chef Straub about the challenges he and his team faced and what they did to overcome it.
In this episode of One On One With, we’re having a conversation with Chuck Cundiff, general manager of retail, catering and concessions with Tulane Dining by Sodexo. At Tulane University, classes have just started, but places like Bourbon Street are still eerily quiet as the devastation of the pandemic marches on. Chuck found a cool way to partner a campus dining food truck with local restaurants that were suffering from the pandemic, and in some cases would have been completely shut down. We’ll find out about the diverse menu options that came about, from Egyptian food to Creole-Vietnamese and classic comfort foods like burgers and ice cream.
Chuck also talks about growing up in New Orleans with a group of neighborhood friends who all ended up working in the food world, and then later pulling that community together again in the current crisis, something that could be even worse than the wreckage left by Hurricane Katrina. The resilience of the city is truly inspiring. Let’s hear Chuck’s story.
Leadership is always important but when a crisis hits, it’s critical.
This episode, I caught up with Veronica McLymont, director of food and nutrition services at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Veronica shares her four pillars for servant leadership: being able to influence and inspire people; being a visionary; the ability to empower people; and being results-oriented.
Veronica talks about how she works to build a dynamic and high-performing team, especially during the trying times of coronavirus. She cautions not to define leadership in terms of seniority or hierarchy, something that’s especially important during a crisis when a great idea can come from any team member.
“Right now, we’re working on how can we achieve great things by extracting the full potential of the people we influence,” she adds.
Her other point: Optimism. It’s a difficult time right now but making sure your team can see the positives will help bring everyone together to achieve the common goal: feeding patients and staff.
Early this year, a major Denver area public school district launched a pilot with Wholesome Food Services to test preordering of school lunches in its high school. Here’s what happened and what they learned.
Adam Weiss, founder of Pike Lane Gardens, worked for Restaurant Associates years ago and maintained a professional relationship with the company throughout his long career in the catering and restaurant industry. As a consultant, Weiss worked with RA, some major NYC restaurant groups and big names like Danny Meyers. Since the pandemic, Weiss and his wife have made their Woodstock, N.Y., weekend home their main residence and Weiss has been teaching gardening classes via Zoom that he’s decided to donate to RA employees from Vermont to Alaska who are furloughed and/or under stress as the foodservice industry has been “rocked,” as he says. He uses gardening as a meditation, and it’s so appropriate to get back to the earth during tumultuous times like this.
Weiss hopes to engage with more corporations and groups with live Instagram gardening events and informational content on the Pike Lane Gardens blog.
“People need some positive energy…the stresses and uncertainties of what’s going on in our industry…it’s brutal,” he says. “But when you’re in the garden, it’s not ‘When I’m I getting back to work?’ or other worries…you are being present.”
We talked with Adam to see how his classes work and to soak up more garden zen wisdom (and tomato tips!)
School districts across the country are bracing for a challenging fall not knowing exactly what they will be facing. Will students be back in the school buildings? How many? What will schedules be like? Will there be a lot of students remaining at home and doing distance learning? All of these questions affect district nutrition programs because they are obligated to feed their students, especially students living in poverty. One director facing this challenge acutely is Michelle Drake, director of food & nutrition services for the Elk Grove Unified School District in California. Drake has spent the past 19 years with Elk Grove US, the last 10 as director. Her program was one of the first in the country to pivot to offering a drive-thru meal service following the district’s shuttering of its schools in early March. The district itself, located adjacent to Sacramento, operates 67 schools, including a charter school, a special education school, an adult education school and four alternative education schools. Enrollment is around 65,000, making it the fifth largest in the state. In this podcast, Drake discusses the adjustments she made in her drive-thru meal program last spring, the changes made in the district’s summer feeding program and her plans for how to approach meal service for students this fall.
Hiking the Appalachian Trail (in segments, such is the life of a busy college dining chef) has given unique perspective to Jonathan Bohn, executive chef with contract management company Sodexo at Marist College. In the month of June, heavy backpack, hot weather and all, Bohn picked up the trail in Connecticut then made his way back home to New York State, where he’s gearing up to take on the school year.
Now, he’s ready to take on the journey that will be fall semester as college dining everywhere adjusts to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Menu planning is in place with lots of comfort food done right in a grab-and-go format. “You can sit there and cry about it, or you can move forward,” he says. Find out exactly how his dining team is moving forward—with a campus garden, thriving relationships with local farmers and food banks—on this episode of Food Management’s One On One With podcast.
Rachel Graham, chief clinical dietitian for John Knox Village and its Woodlands skilled nursing and rehab facility, talks about how the senior living community has had to modify its communal approach to resident dining because of the coronavirus crisis while still giving residents opportunities for socialization in a safe way.
When you’ve spent 40 years in child nutrition programs, you know a thing or two about creating a successful program. For Miguel Villarreal, that’s creating a nutrition-led program, built around community support with a big dash of recognition. Villarreal is the director of child nutrition and warehouse at San Ramon Valley Unified School District in California.
After spending 17 years in Novato Unified School District, Villarreal made the jump to San Ramon a year ago. He arrived with grand plans—and then the coronavirus hit. While he and his team have shifted quickly to maintain service to the community, Villarreal had to put a few big plans on hold. But he’s been incredibly pleased and honored to see child nutrition programs receiving some of the credit they deserve—including the cover of Time magazine (Villarreal himself was quoted in an issue).
Now, as the pandemic slows at least a bit, Villarreal talks about his plans for the fall and how the current protests surrounding racial equality also align with food equality, an issue he says child nutrition programs play a large role in. Here’s his story.
Have a story to share? Email me at becky.schilling@informa.com.
There is almost no doubt that college campuses this fall will be a lot different from past years—assuming they actually can reopen following this spring’s coronavirus-forced shutdowns, that is. Issues like social distancing, sanitation measures, customer jitters and the banning of some traditional modes of operation such as self-service will force college dining programs to rethink how they operate while still providing quality meals and efficient service to their customers. Technology promises to play a big role in facilitating that transition, and Fresh ideas Food Service Management is one company that has been at the leading edge of embracing high-tech solutions. The FM Top 50 firm has already deployed technologies ranging from selfie-based dining hall check-in and an app allowing personalized customer service to a “panic button” that quickly alerts managers to problems and complaints and, most recently, a mobile ordering platform for all-you-care-to-eat dining hall stations. Bob Love as the company’s chief technology officer is the tip of the spear when it comes to Fresh Ideas’ high-tech operations. Here are his thoughts on how technologies the company is deploying can help campus dining programs meet the challenge of the post-COVID campus.
If healthcare patient feeding had been a well-oiled machine, coronavirus has totally been a wrench thrown into the works. But the healthcare dining staff at Stony Brook Hospital—with no time to spare—overhauled what patient feeding looks like. At the highest point, about 70% of patients there were suffering from coronavirus. Those counts are down now, but the hospital is wary and ready for a second wave of the virus should that occur.
Kathleen Carrozza, RD, assistant director of food and retail services at Stony Brook Hospital, has more than two decades of experience and has been ready to take on this new challenge. She shares with us the realities of feeding patients—hot trays went out the window and paper bags of cold items were used instead on floors dining staff could not enter. The patients—some lacking sense of taste and smell—were sometimes too weak to want to eat anything, so it was up to Carrozza and the team to find solutions: chicken soup is one; ice cream is another. Listen to hear more of Kathleen’s story.
In this week’s episode of One On One With, we talk with Dan Giusti, who became famous as executive chef of prestigious Noma in Copenhagen, then headed back to the U.S. to found Brigaid in 2016.
Brigaid is a small crew of chefs who partner with schools on training and scratch recipes, and in New London, Conn., Brigaid is working at the ground level and serving thousands of meals per day for students in need. They’re also partnering with a senior center and providing meals there as well.
As a former fine-dining chef of the highest order, Giusti says sometimes his resume stands in the way (making him feel like an outsider at times), but by getting down to business in school cafeterias, he’s proving himself in this world every day.
He tells us about the types of menu items he’s found to be working best in a grab-and-go environment. A lot of the dishes are pure global comfort foods; all are pretty interesting. And he’s looking ahead to the future of school food as we all are (with a mix of apprehension and determination), so we talked about that, too.
Chris Galarza, Parkhurst Dining chef at Chatham University’s Eden Hall campus, is working to bring sustainability and its intersection with food service into the forefront. He’s working with cutting-edge kitchen equipment, grafting apple trees and keeping the trout population happy at the university’s fishery.
Galarza tells Food Management about some interesting facets of the campus, such as the apiary, maple syrup making, mushroom growing and the fermentation club, which brews specialty beers and other beverages. Incorporating the locally grown and produced ingredients onto dining menus brings the circle together in terms of students and community, as the whole campus is open to the public.
And that’s just the beginning. In an effort to share what he’s learned, Galarza has started a consultancy, Forward Dining Solutions, that is working with several large organizations on sustainable cooking innovations. He waxes a bit philosophical on the role food systems play in a swiftly changing world where wellness is hot-button topic.
The World Bank is known for a diverse workforce, with more than 180 countries making up the employees. The foodservice team reflects that diversity—there are 14 stations, with each serving two meat-based protein options and one vegetarian option daily.
The World Bank isn’t just diverse, it’s big. The dining team routinely serves 8,000 meals each day in its five locations throughout Washington, D.C.
So what happens to a large and diverse foodservice program in the world post-COVID-19? I spoke with Sharon Eliatamby, senior project manager, food and conference services at the World Bank to find out.
From an increase in grab-and-go options to a reduction in catering, Sharon and I talked about the phases in which the dining program could reopen and how the new normal manifests itself at the World Bank.
Have a story to share? Email me at becky.schilling@informa.com.
Harvest Table Culinary Group at Elon University has been raising the bar there with next-level flavors and impressive catering setups. But like other campuses across the country, COVID-19 closures have meant an interruption to the communal aspect of dining.
Jay Vetter, executive chef, and the team there are keeping a positive perspective for students still on campus, and those who may be able to come in the fall. Though picking up food is contactless, the marketing team has made sure dining is in contact with students virtually, through cooking classes and a gorgeous Instagram account.
Creating meals that nourish and comfort is what this team was built to do, Vetter says, and they’re taking advantage of any downtime to conceptualize and develop solutions for no matter what the future may hold. They are also making some pretty great milkshakes, which make everything better, no question.
In this week’s episode of One On One With, Food Management’s podcast, we catch up with a dining director in a long-term care facility in the hard-hit state of New Jersey. Between deaths, every-changing rules, regulations and expectations, my guest today has had to deal with it all.
I today’s episode, I catch up with Debra Ryan. Debra is the food service director at Oakland Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center in Oakland, N.J. From just the change in mask-wearing policy alone, the past two months have been what Debra calls a roller coaster ride. Throw in a couple of in-person and virtual department audits, and you’ll start seeing just how stressful running a foodservice program in a coronavirus hotbed had been.
Here’s what Debra said: “Yes, it’s risky, but the work we’re doing is very fulfilling. The residents here are our family. As we started to see them pass away, especially those that we became bonded with, it’s so emotionally taxing. We are doing everything we can as a team, as a healthcare team, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like it’s enough. In the beginning I thought, how can I expect my team to show up to work knowing what they know and seeing what they’re seen. But they did and they still are. And to me, that’s so commendable.”
Listen in to learn more about what the team at Oakland Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center is doing to make it safely through this pandemic.
Have a story to share? Email me at becky.schilling@informa.com.
In this episode of Food Management’s podcast, we talk with Jessica Shelly, MBA, SNS, director of student dining services at Cincinnati Public Schools, a district that has set up many locations for getting food to kids during school closures due to COVID-19.
When the coronavirus pandemic closed schools, many of the neediest kids were suddenly without their usual school food. “It’s like a snow day but multiplied,” Shelly says, describing the sinking feeling school food professionals get on snow days, when they know some kids may not eat on those days when school closes.
Shelly tells us what’s been happening in the often rainy or snowy scenes of spring in Cincinnati, from the front lines of making sure her employees, parents and young scholars (as she calls them) are feeling safe and taken care of. Luckily, that’s something Shelly and her team are good at, always looking to those scholars for the inspiration and the “why” of getting up each day and serving meals.
We’re now a month into the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. And one of the first places to see cases the U.S. was San Francisco, where today’s One On One With guest calls home. On the podcast today Dan Henroid joins me. Dan is the director of nutrition and food services at UCSF Health.
And while Dan says his hospitals were well prepared to take on the pandemic, he admits it hasn’t come without stressors and strain, particularly on the personal level. Dan speaks with me today about some of the early measures his team has implemented to get ahead of the virus and also how he’s fast-tracking the opening of a new hospital to help serve the community during coronavirus. Here’s Dan’s story.
Want to be on our podcast and share your story? Email me at becky.schilling@informa.com. Thanks for listening and be well.
The elderly are one of our most vulnerable populations, and one of the first to be isolated during the global coronavirus pandemic. These past few weeks have posed challenges to those who feed and care for our seniors, and the solutions are evolving every day.
On a daily basis, Sodexo’s Senior Vice President of North America Seniors Arthur B. Silva is in contact with senior dining operators who must find solutions for all sorts of situations, from telling family members they can’t visit to finding ways to care for those in memory care and keeping staff safe when the future is uncertain.
Silva shares with us how senior dining is starting each new day jumping over hurdles and getting creative to find new solutions to things that hadn’t been an issue before—like when a resident needs a dining associate to physically help them eat. Also, Silva talks about what Sodexo is doing as a company to ensure its teams of caregivers are taken care of as well.
College campuses are designed to housing students, but that could change at the University of Nebraska. As the coronavirus pandemic hits the nation’s healthcare systems in full force, hospital beds are in great need. But as patients are on the road to recovery from COVID-19, they might be moved out of hospitals and into other locations to finish isolation.
That’s a possibility Dave Annis, director of dining services at the University of Nebraska, is preparing for. He says there’s a possibility that up to 1,000 people could be housed on campus, and his dining services team would be providing meals for them each day.
I also caught up with Annis about how Nebraska has been dealing with coronavirus. There are still about 750 students on campus and the dining team has been working diligently to feed them—and be safe for students and staff.
But to kick off our conversation, we had a quick chat about his move from the University of Oklahoma, where Annis spent 33 years and how he quickly—some might say a little too quickly—shifted his college football loyalties.
Have a story to share on our podcast, email me at becky.schilling@informa.com
After being recognized as a Silver Plate winner this year, Bertrand Weber had barely time for that honor to register before he and his team at Minneapolis Public Schools were thrown into a whole new world of feeding kids during the COVID-19 pandemic. Always one to deflect the praise, the director of culinary and wellness services was quick to say the award was due to a team effort.
Weber tells us what it’s been like since the first school closures at his district, where rain or shine (mostly blustery rain), the crew has set up sites to distribute meals to the community’s kids who need it most. In a large district like this, the central production kitchen has come in clutch, but not as clutch as the devoted workers who make it happen.
It’s a surreal situation but tempered by the everyday logistics that keep Weber and his team very, very busy. Listen to his experiences, and also the advice he has to offer other school districts in this tumultuous time.
On this special edition of One On One With, Food Management’s podcast, I speak with Aatul Jain, executive chef at Saint Peter’s University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J. Jain is also on the board of the Association of Healthcare Foodservice (AHF), many of whose members are confronting the coronavirus crisis head-on.
I spoke with Jain the day after St. Patrick’s Day, and he says that because he and his team prepared, they are in good shape. But he knows that there’s a rough road ahead for many operators in hospitals as the virus continues to spread.
We spoke about how food and nutrition departments will continue to serve their No. 1 customers—their patients—and how they are ensuring the health and safety of employees, including their mental well-being during what can only be described as high stress.
We also hit on ways operators are changing service during coronavirus, the supply chain and a host of other topics related to healthcare foodservice in the times of coronavirus.
While coronavirus isn’t new, it became real in the last week. Restaurants and bars across the country are being shut down as governments look for ways to ensure social distancing. But how do you practice social distancing on a college campus, where thousands of students gather each day to live, to learn and to eat?
The answer for many colleges is to extend spring breaks, move to online-only classes or forcing students to move off campus. That’s effectively closing down all aspect of college campus life, including dining services.
In light of all this, I spoke with Kirk Rodriguez, managing director of hospitality services at Texas Tech University and the current president of NACUFS. We talked about how NACUFS is handling the spread of coronavirus (the association postponed its regional conferences); how college directors are working through the closures and uncertainty; and what’s happening currently at Texas Tech.
We know the situation with coronavirus is ever changing, so please tune in to future editions of One On One With and check out our up-to-date coronavirus coverage at food-management.com/coronavirus.
Morrison Living’s Corporate Executive Chef Christian Schultz started his career in restaurants and country clubs.
In this episode of Food Management’s podcast, we talk with Christian Schultz, corporate executive chef with Morrison Living. Contract management company Morrison Living provides foodservice for senior dining facilities all over the country, and Schultz spends most of his time traveling to different accounts and analyzing what’s happening and what needs to be done to meet expectations.
We’re asking him about working with clients who are committed to caring for our seniors and all the challenges that encompasses. Wellness and special diets are part of it but working together with staff and administration is the behind-the-scenes part.
Schultz also tells us about building strong senior dining menus by including senior-friendly food trends and paying attention to regional preferences. Another aspect Morrison emphasizes is allowing chefs at individual accounts to put their own creative stamp on menus, something that keeps the kitchen staff engaged, and the senior residents (and stakeholders at the accounts) happy.
After nearly 30 decades in child nutrition, Mark Bordeau, senior food service director of the Broome Tioga BOCES in upstate New York has learned many lessons. He’s created a highly successful school food program that manages cafeterias in 15 districts, with combined purchasing power of $18 million. He developed the Rock On Café a marketing program to promote fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains and low-fat or fat-free milk.
But perhaps one of the biggest lessons he’s learned is turning his profession into a passion, something he learned from his mentor Ray Dennison, a former child nutrition director.
I caught up with Bordeau after his took home the School Nutrition Association’s top award this January, which came just days after Dennison’s passing. We talked about creating that passion within your profession, building a team to help affect positive change in the students you create and about building a highly successful farm-to-school program.
In this edition of the Food Management podcast, we talk with Scott Swiger about how plant-forward thinking has changed Spectra’s culinary and business sides in terms of concessions, catering and more.
If you could remake a school cafeteria, what would it look like? That’s the basis of a newly released report by FoodCorps, a nonprofit that works with communities to connect students to healthy food in school. The team’s Reimaging School Cafeteria’s report provides 13 areas of opportunity for child nutrition professionals, schools and the community.
The report was conducted by doing face-to-face interviews with more than 300 students and 100 adult stakeholders in the schools, including teachers, principals and child nutrition professionals. The interviews were conducted in nine schools, representing diverse backgrounds and service styles for lunches.
Listen in as I dig in with Erica Curry, director of education for FoodCorps, on how students, in particular, would reimagine their school cafeteria, if given the chance.
Happy New Year from Food Management. One of the best parts of a new year is setting New Year’s resolutions and planning new programs. To help operators and chefs, I sat down with Food Management’s Senior Food Editor Tara Fitzpatrick to find out the trends she thinks will be hot in 2020.
From the next extension of the chicken sandwich to alternative burgers, find out what Tara thinks you should be adding to your menus in college dining, K-12 schools, healthcare and B&I cafes.
In this episode of Food Management’s podcast, we talk with Karen Hallford, MS RD LD, director of the school nutrition program at Gwinnett County (Ga.) Public Schools. We’re tackling a somewhat difficult topic, and that’s how to not let one negative attitude drag down your whole kitchen, a relatable problem for lots of districts.
Hallford provides tips on setting expectations for your staff and intervening when things get too rough, along with incentive programs and leadership skills that keep energy levels high for employees serving the littlest guests.
Bruno Tison was the executive chef of the Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa in California, which received the coveted Michelin start three consecutive years. Then, after 30 years in the restaurant industry, Tison decided to move into healthcare foodservice and joined the team at New York’s Northwell Health.
Tison knew making changes would be difficult, but he’s already made significant changes in the menu, purchasing and production at the 22-hospital healthcare system. We caught up with Tison to learn about his journey into healthcare dining and what’s next for Northwell Health.
In this episode of Food Management’s podcast, we talk with Wesley Turnage, CEC, CCE, CCA, FMP, district executive chef with Sodexo at Tulane University, a school in New Orleans with students and faculty from all over the world. Turnage talks about Cajun vs. Creole food, sharing the rich culinary traditions of the city with students while keeping up with trends and making new food experiences accessible for everyone. He also lets us know about a few unexpected food trends that have him experimenting in the kitchen.
It seems like a week doesn’t go by without another news story about so-called “lunch shaming.” The issue stems from the complex challenge of unpaid meal debt, and what to do with hungry children who show up in the cafeteria unable to pay for a meal. No child nutrition professional wants to see a child go hungry, but these departments also run on tight budgets and are mandated to have zero debt. Oftentimes, the result is public relations nightmare, with few understanding the issue for school meal programs.
In this week’s podcast, I talk with Lori Adkins, child nutrition consultant with Oakland Schools in Michigan, about dealing with so-called lunch shaming.
In this episode of Food Management’s podcast, we talk with Barbara Hamilton, MAS, sustainability officer and Chris McCracken, director of nutrition services at UC San Diego Health, where they’ve adopted the Cool Food Pledge with World Resources Institute (WRI) to address the connections between human health and environment.
Hamilton and McCracken get into what sustainable food means in the healthcare environment, how they’ve adapted menus and worked within the community for a better understanding on how food on a large scale can have a positive impact on the planet.
Keto. Paleo. Gluten-free. Intermittent fasting. These are just a few of the diet trends that consumers, especially college students, are latching onto. Couple that with the fact that colleges are becoming even more culturally diverse, with large foreign student populations. So just how to dining services departments deal with that?
I spoke with Zia Ahmed, senior director of dining at Ohio State University, about how he defines healthy (hint: It includes serving pizza and fried chicken) and how his dining team works to ensure they are meeting all their students’ health and wellness needs.
School nutrition departments serve nearly 5 billion lunches each year, many to low-income families. And when school is out for the summer, so many children are left without a place to eat. That’s why the USDA’s summer feeding program started. While many think the program is only for schools, it’s open for other foodservice operations, including hospitals.
In this week’s podcast we speak with Andrew Bergman, manager of food service for the ProHealth Care System in Wisconsin, about starting the hospital’s summer feeding program, what it takes to run and what it’s meant to the community.
In this episode of Food Management’s podcast, we talk with Jessica Shelly, director of child nutrition and wellness at Cincinnati Public Schools, a district that serves more than 30,000 students every day.
Shelly talks about her wildly successful breakfast in the classroom program, grants for more fruits and veggies, local purchasing, creating customizable bars that really work, and the ins and outs of Cincinnati chili.
According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the number of students who enrolled in colleges in the spring 2019 semester dropped for the eighth consecutive year. The decline this spring was only 1.7%, but represents 300,000 fewer students, and when compounded over eight years, that’s no small drop in the bucket.
So just what happens when student enrollment declines? We talked with Matt Whelan, vice president of strategic initiatives, president of the Faculty Student Association at Stony Brook University in New York. Dr. Whelan’s group manages the dining services program at the university, along with other student services groups, and he’s got a firsthand look at student enrollment trends.
In this episode of Food Management’s podcast, we talk with Ryan Curry, executive chef with Spectra at the Isotopes Stadium in Albuquerque, N.M., where he’s introduced some of the wildest menu items ever, including a cotton candy topped, green chili-spiced burger.
Curry also talks about trends he’s thinking about trying, collaborating with his fellow chefs and his culinary past in Alaska.
In our latest edition of Food Management’s podcast, senior editor Tara Fitzpatrick catches Joe Urban in between his exciting culinary travels, which he uses to come up with some of the most exciting school meals out there. Urban is director of food and nutrition services for Greenville County (S.C.) Schools, the largest district in South Carolina and the 44th largest in the U.S.
In this episode of One On One, Food Management's Editor in Chief Becky Schilling sits down with Beth Emery, director of dining services at Boston College.
“I’m proud to have a very talented team that is always trying to come up with new and innovative ideas for college students who are pretty savvy and eat out a lot.” That’s how Beth Emery describes her department. And come up with new and innovative ideas they do. In the past year alone, BC Dining has been named Innovator and received a Best Concept award.
Part of being innovative is listening to your customers, something the team is doing through the BC Test Kitchen. We recently caught up with Emery about the test kitchen and how delivery didn’t exactly catch on with her students.
In this episode of Food Management’s podcast, senior food editor Tara Fitzpatrick catches up with Morrison’s corporate chef Greg Cordova about making wellness work in the kitchen.
In this episode of Food Management’s podcast, Editor in Chief Becky Schilling talks with Terri Moreman of the US Olympic Committee on feeding our country’s elite athletes and the 2020 Summer Olympics.
In our latest edition of Food Management’s podcast, Senior food editor Tara Fitzpatrick catches up with Loudon County’s Stefanie Dove to find out how she’s changed the perception of school meals for both her students and parents.
In our latest edition of Food Management’s podcast, Editor in Chief Becky Schilling speaks with Jim McGrody of UNC REX Healthcare about starting a food pantry and creating a culture of culinary excellence at a hospital.
In our second edition of Food Management’s podcast, Editor in Chief Becky Schilling speaks with Barry Sackin, president of Sackin and Associates, about the pitfalls and ethics of purchasing in the school environment.
Editor in Chief Becky Schilling talks with Randy Lait in Food Management’s inaugural podcast. Lait shares some breaking news about his role with NC State dining, reflects on winning the Silver Plate and how NC State’s ice cream “saved my mother’s life.”