Five foodservice operators from five different segments tackle questions ranging from the changing expectations of customers and management to technology’s impact on design.
Corporate Dining
Rob Yayac
Food Program Manager
Pacific Northwest and Southern California
Seattle
Q: From an employee perspective, how have the expectations for corporate dining evolved?
A: It’s easy for a corporate dining operation to not see things from the user’s perspective. The past year has really been transformative in that way for me. The No. 1 factor is convenience. Employees want to know if they can get their food quickly as they often want one less thing to worry about in their days so they can focus on doing their jobs. Second, they want to know if the food can be both convenient and healthy. Providing them with healthy dining options becomes one less element of their health they have to plan for. And flavor rules. The expectations around quality and variety are extremely high. All of the different eaters — halal, vegan, vegetarian — need to find something that makes them comfortable. It takes a talented culinary team to deliver a high satisfaction rate.
Q: Have management expectations evolved over the past couple of years?
A: Google specifically has always made food about bringing people together. We call it casual collisions. We want to give people a reason to come into the office. We want you to enjoy your experience, be productive and have your needs met. We want you to be able to focus on the bigger vision and the strategic pieces that go along with it. Foodservice is a big part of that hierarchy of needs we are taking care of. Food as a perk — especially good food — will be a draw for people.
Q: Google has locations all over the world, which means you have a diverse employee base. What steps do you take to embrace different backgrounds and celebrate them through foodservice?
A: It comes down to having the right balance of offerings that cater to cultures, diets and more. We have a menu framework that says you should have a plant-forward approach or a certain amount of halal offerings, depending on the size of the office as well as its demographics. We have surprise and delight offerings, too. We will also offer pop-ups and provide certain types of cuisines. Say it’s Lunar New Year, we would work with our Asian community to provide food supporting that. Google also empowers decisions to be made locally, too. That’s because the demographics in our office, say, in Chicago, differ when compared with our offices in India and Zurich. So it’s important to empower people to make decisions on a local level.
Q: What role is technology playing in your operations, and how does that impact foodservice design, equipment selection, etc.?
A: We are at an inflection point with that right now. Historically, we made a point to keep tech out of our cafes. Our engineers spend all day working at their screens, and visiting our cafes provided a break from that. Last year, we started to pilot mobile and kiosk ordering at specific locations. I am encouraged by mobile ordering to address specific challenges. It can save people time, in theory, if their order is ready when they get there. But you must be able to operationally support that. And how does that impact people who walk up and order? We are going in the direction of providing them the option of either.
Q: Catering has long been an underrated aspect of corporate dining. What role is it playing in your operations these days?
A: It’s definitely back. From fully plated meals to box lunches, we are fully back and using it all. We see high volumes in catering, but it does fluctuate seasonally. The need for catering, though, is really to help support business objectives. You have to be able to customize solutions to support that specific event, whether that’s making your clients feel special or your team feel special. I think catering in what we do, meaning the corporate dining world, is underappreciated. It’s something that is so tied to a business’s performance and whether that business has the funds to do something above and beyond, which is in the very nature of catering.
Q: What’s an area of foodservice you are excited to explore?
A: For me, it’s really leaning into understanding what people want and what drives satisfaction today. That’s an interesting challenge. Anyone who has worked in this industry knows that you can’t make everyone happy. What is it about places that do it so well? How can you emulate that elsewhere? How are they making people feel valued and seen? You can have five different chefs execute the same menu and have five different experiences. The key is getting them to provide an excellent experience every day. We want that to keep happening.
Healthcare Foodservice
Andrew Bergman
Director of Food and Nutrition Services
Paducah, Ky.
Q: Describe how foodservice at Baptist Health has evolved in the past two years.
A: Baptist Health is a large system that serves Kentucky and Southern Indiana. For more than 30 years, all but one location worked with a contract feeder. That was Baptist Health Floyd. In 2018, though, Lisa Shoopman, the now associate vice president of foodservice for Baptist Health, and Ann Philips, the executive director for foodservice at Baptist Health, submitted a proposal to take the entire system self-op.
Once they got the green light, Baptist Health started the interview process to find leaders to help take each location’s foodservice operation self-op. I took this position in January 2023 and we at the Paducah facility transitioned from contract to self-op by June of that year. The rest of the hospitals in the system transitioned a few months before or after that.
Why did Baptist Health want to transition to self-op? For starters, our Press-Ganey scores were abysmal, and we had equipment and infrastructure that was 30-plus years old. To improve the patient experience, we knew we had a lot of work to do to build the culture and infrastructure. We adjusted the culture to include more accountability and interdepartmental collaboration.
As part of our transition, we have implemented order-taking technology and now have a chef-driven menu. And now we are investing in frontline training for our staff. It’s a multifaceted online training course for culinary workers. And now we are investing in our infrastructure.
At my location in Paducah, for example, we completely renovated our walk-in freezer because there was a safety issue.
And we replaced some other items that were completely outdated; we had certain refrigeration units that used freon that was no longer available.
Over the past two years we have completely changed the department. It’s been a heavy lift but the net of it is we’ve decreased costs and increased revenues. We’ve seen overall improvement in our patient satisfaction scores.
Q: Looking ahead, how will Baptist Health’s foodservice operation evolve to remain relevant?
A: The biggest focus will be on increasing our patient experience scores and creating a Baptist brand that will be recognized at all of our facilities throughout the state. You will see that brand on our menus, our signage and more. We are trying to erase that stigma attached to ‘hospital food.’
We are also transitioning from a traditional tray-line model to an on-demand, room service model for patient feeding. Room service is an industry best practice and that’s where we need to be.
Waste reduction and sustainability will be next. We are looking at different models and technologies to see what works best for us to be more environmentally friendly. When it comes to sustainability, for example, we will have to purchase new equipment to support the room service model. When doing so, we will look for items that are energy efficient.
Q: In what ways will the design of your operations have to change?
A: With room service we will extend our hours of operation and that will require additional staff. So, that will be the biggest investment, but we also feel the return on investment is there as proven by the increase in patient satisfaction scores.
A lot of our facilities will require new construction to implement room service but here in Paducah that’s not the case. We have a very large kitchen and can move things around. We will need a lot of new equipment to support room service, though. That will include combi ovens, high-speed ovens, cooktops that can accommodate on-demand orders of omelets and other menu items. Our hotline will be completely reversed as will our fire suppression system.
We will also need to update our electrical infrastructure. We will implement roller conveyors to support our tray assembly, too.
We also plan to update our coffee shop, which now operates from a space that used to house a nationally branded pizza concept. We are going to gut this space and completely re-do it. We want to make it more upscale and use some semi-automatic coffee makers to diversify the drink menu, and we want to go to a high-speed oven to help diversify the food menu. This space is already very popular and has a loyal following. We want to take that to the next level.
School Foodservice
Jessica Shelly, MBA, SNS, REHS
Director, Student Dining Services
Cincinnati
Q: How have expectations evolved for school foodservice?
A: We are no longer lunch ladies. We are lunch educators. Our lunchrooms and cafeterias are opportunities to educate and build good habits for a lifetime. Good nutrition is as important as learning your ABCs and 123s. Food is medicine that makes people healthy and our next generations of leaders. I cringe when people say “school lunch.” We are lunch served at school. The students are our customers, and they will tell us what they like, and they will vote with their feet. It’s our job to teach them about new foods, cultures, flavors and textures that they can’t get in their own homes. That point was driven home to me when a kindergartener came to me and asked, “What is this?” It was a whole pear. This student had only seen diced pears in a can. That showed me the impact we can have.
Q: Speed of service is a big deal for restaurants, but many people don’t realize how important it is at the school foodservice level, too. What are some steps you can take to feed lots of students in small windows of time?
A: It’s really challenging. We serve more meals than the biggest restaurant chain in the city. We have to be well-versed in batch cooking and have to have the right kind of equipment that can provide the absolute best quality product. No matter how delicious the steamed broccoli is, nobody wants to eat it after it’s been held for two hours. This requires us to understand the flow of students and how to schedule so we can batch cook our menu. For example, we know students are coming through at 11 a.m., so that means our team starts to warm the sauce 30 minutes beforehand and drop the pasta 15 minutes beforehand. Students don’t have enough time to eat. The recommended seat time is 20 minutes — that is from the time you find a place to eat and begin consuming the food. Schools give 20 minutes total time for lunch, including walking down the hallway, washing hands, getting food and eating it. It’s not that the food we serve is something students don’t want to enjoy. But when you tack on recess as part of the meal period, they will prioritize socializing over eating. But it should not be a choice. Mealtime should be an important, respected part of the day. That has to change.
Q: Limited-time offers are a big part of chains’ strategies to create foot traffic and maintain customer interest. What are a few things school foodservice operators do to keep their menus fresh in the eyes of students?
A: We do LTOs, too. We mimic a lot of what we see in quick-service restaurants and collegiate dining. At the high school level, we might have 12 different entrees on a given day. And every day, we have a vegan and a vegetarian option. At the grill line, it might not be a simple cheeseburger. Instead, we might offer a rodeo burger. The same thing happens at our pizza line. It might be a Hawaiian pizza. We have one called Sargent Peppers that includes a variety of peppers. We do have standard items, but we try to be inventive and try to advertise that throughout our schools.
It takes a lot of due diligence to make sure an LTO does not compromise quality or service. Part of that due diligence includes executing the LTOs in our test kitchen. We also look back at our historical data to determine how much to make of everything. It’s a lot of training, too. We want our staff to be comfortable with the menu items and understand timing so we can serve the highest quality with minimum food waste.
Q: Distributed items are becoming a bigger deal in school foodservice. How is this playing out in your schools?
A: For many high school students, it’s more important to sleep in than to get to school early for breakfast. Some schools in our district are bigger, and it makes it harder for students to get to the cafeteria in the morning. So bringing breakfast to them will help drive participation in the morning meal. To accomplish this, we have some breakfast kiosks. We did have reimbursable meal vending machines, but they did not perform as well as we wanted. We focus on meals, not a la carte service. We don’t want students to be torn between a la carte and full meals. We want them to migrate to the healthy, nutritious meals. And we find this approach leads to better participation and revenues.
Q: How will school foodservice evolve to remain relevant?
A: We have to stay creative, and we have to stay vested. This will be tough due to some of the USDA regulations about to take effect. I don’t think school foodservice operators will have trouble with meeting the sodium and sugar limits if they scratch cook. But there’s a Buy American Act coming that will be challenging.
Buy American has always been in place for school and nutrition programs. The food you buy has to be American produced. Our district supports that and buys as much local as it can. We want to support our own economy. Starting this year, though, 10% or less of our school food purchases can come from outside the U.S. And that level will decline in future years. CPS [Cincinnati Public Schools] had 12% of its food purchases coming from outside the U.S., and that was mainly fresh fruit and vegetables. Where this becomes an issue is when you want to offer food items, like kiwis or mangoes that are not produced here. In the winter, we can’t get grapes from U.S. sources. Does that mean we don’t serve grapes for six months?
We want to provide students with a greater variety of fruits and vegetables that are not canned. Parents and activists want us to serve fresh fruit and vegetables, too. But Buy American will make that harder. It’s an unintended consequence.
Q: What role is technology playing in your operations?
A: Technology is everywhere. We use it to make sure we are doing our best to meet our fiduciary responsibility. We get a lot of federal funding, and we want to make sure we are spending that money and tracking it correctly. We are using an ordering-management system that connects our operations with our broadline supplier, for example. Let’s say that the distributor has to make a substitution. The software catches that substitution, adjusts the price and sends that information back to the distributor. That makes us more efficient. We have one person in our office whose job is to go through invoices to make sure they are accurate. We have 70 schools that get seven to eight invoices a week. That’s a lot. A program like this helps streamline that process and makes this person more efficient. We want to get that person working on bigger-picture items.
Fast Casual
Cole Thompson
Vice President of Culinary
Head Chef
Atlanta
Q: How have customer expectations evolved for fast-casual brands like Barberitos?
A: Customer expectations for fast-casual brands have changed a lot. Factors fueling these changes include technology, innovation and consumers’ changing lifestyles. One of the changes that impacts us the most is customization. Today’s consumer wants to be able to customize their orders based on their flavor preferences, health and more. We have a good tool on our website that allows you to customize your journey. Say, for example, you have a gluten allergy or are on a keto diet, the site will come up with what you should order at each of our brands to meet these specific requirements. This feature is not new to us. It’s a feature we have had at Saladworks for a few years and started implementing at our other brands in the past year and a half.
Overall, though, the expectations keep getting higher every year. The expectations for food quality keep rising, but consumers want it at the same speed as a quick-service restaurant, and that is a big challenge.
Q: Discuss what considerations to weigh from a design and equipment perspective when developing LTOs. How do you ensure you pick the right menu item without compromising speed of service or food quality?
A: We roll out new LTOs every quarter for each of our brands. It’s a big part of our strategy. What LTOs we decide to add will tap into the trends shaping the industry. Maybe the LTO will support a health-related trend or a trending food type, like Korean barbecue.
And fitting any LTO into our current operations is crucial to its success. We have to be able to understand our current operations and capabilities to have a successful LTO. For that reason, when we develop our list of LTOs for the coming year, the first groups we discuss them with are supply chain and operations teams to make sure these menu items will work within our current layouts.
WOWorks has multiple different brands: Barberitos, Frutta Bowls, Garbanzo Mediterranean Fresh, Saladworks, The Simple Greek and Z!Eats (formerly Zoup! Eatery). With Frutta Bowls, we partnered with La Colombe to develop a new cold brew coffee, and we then added it into our smoothies and bowls. For Barberitos, we added bacon to the menu a year ago. It really blew up and wound up our third-highest protein (behind chicken and steak). It’s another protein that was easy to offer, and people are adding it on to lots of orders.
Q: Digital ordering and off-premises consumption of restaurant-prepared food have never been more popular. Discuss the impact of third-party delivery and off-premises consumption on design.
A: It’s definitely a big shift. We had to rethink our kitchen layouts and our store layouts to be able to execute all of that. The inside of our stores is getting smaller and smaller, but that helps with costs. This allows us to go into some nontraditional spaces like airports and universities where they may have some square-footage restrictions. Despite being smaller, some of those units are among our highest-volume locations.
Q: What are some ways WOWorks’ brands will evolve to remain relevant?
A: We are always going to have to innovate to stay relevant, and as a chef, I will say we have to do so from a culinary perspective. But we have to have the right design and equipment to support those culinary innovations, too. We’ve come a long way integrating our digital and in-store experiences to make it seamless for our guests. For example, we have had success in implementing self-serve kiosks in our stores. The ticket averages are up, and the order accuracy is better, too. So, we are trying to stay ahead of the curve there.
We are doing a lot of co-branding, too. That will be important moving forward over the next couple of years. Co-branding can lead to some complexities operationally, but it offers variety to our customers. For locations where each brand does a super high volume, you can dedicate people to that concept. Otherwise, you have to try to cross-train people as much as possible.
We started co-branding a few years ago with Saladworks and Frutta Bowls. This year, we expect to co-brand with Barberitos and Frutta Bowls, as well as Z!Eats and Frutta Bowls. Frutta Bowls has had a lot of success co-branding with Saladworks. That’s because the Frutta Bowl menu of smoothies, acai bowls and more makes a lot of sense for snacking occasions and other dayparts. For example, Z!Eats is known for its soup in the colder seasons, and Frutta Bowls does better during the warmer months.
Collegiate Dining
Kory Samuels
Associate Vice President of Auxiliary Services
Rochester Institute of Technology
Rochester, N.Y.
Q: Describe how foodservice at RIT has evolved over the past five years.
A: Since 2019, one of the biggest things that has been impactful for our operations is the investment in our staff from a talent development and organizational design perspective. I have been a large proponent of professionalizing ourselves. People who work in foodservice can feel that they are lesser than someone else, being in the service industry, but I never bought into that. So, to combat that, we can never compromise on investing in our professional development. That includes attending The NAFEM Show and other association events, a variety of local and national restaurants, and even other foodservice operators.
We also made some significant changes in terms of technology. We implemented a new fund-management system that manages students’ meal plans and campus funds. We also implemented an inventory/menu-management application along with new point-of-sale systems that include mobile ordering.
Q: How will RIT’s foodservice operations evolve to remain relevant?
A: Over the past few years, it’s not just about the quality of the food you serve, the depth of your options or even food safety. Now it’s about the totality of your experience. We have done so much to provide safe, quality food, but now we have to make investments in our facilities by updating our serveries, seating areas and kitchens. We have a few aging facilities, and the totality of that experience will not put us where we want to be until we make those investments. Whether it’s a member of the faculty or a student, we are being judged based on the restaurant experiences they have off-campus. So, we have to update and adapt to meet them where they are.
Additionally, we will have to invest more in research. Because budgets are getting tighter, everyone wants to have more data-driven decisions. We also want to get more information from outside sources. Our vendors serve a wide range of customers and have insights into trends — in some cases, more than we do. This information will allow us to stay ahead of our customer base.
Q: How have expectations of foodservice operations changed in recent years for RIT?
A: We are a self-operated dining department. We’ve always needed to be financially stable, which means we do not cost the university money and have to fund initiatives ourselves. College enrollments across the country are either stabilizing or declining. As a result, we are planning for an enrollment cliff that will happen in 2026. We know in New York State, college enrollment will be at least 15% lower than it is today. That means we have to look for students in new areas and we have to continue to be financially stable.
What’s happening on campus is that many areas, including foodservice, are seen as a central component of students’ success. The pandemic brought this to the forefront because those basic needs — food, shelter and health — became even more important. Students choosing a school want to see a campus and know they belong. We have to look at foodservice not as just giving you a great dining experience but also as being part of a community. There needs to be a personal connection, and that’s something that’s changed over the years.
Our foodservice leaders are now more involved in strategic university initiatives. We have a lot of data available on campus that we can share with other departments. An example of this is that we monitor purchasing patterns for students, and we receive an alert when they have not eaten, which prompts someone to check on them. That’s something only we can provide because we own these technologies.
Q: How will adapting to change influence how you design and equip operations?
A: Some things we have to think of in terms of foodservice equipment are volume and durability. Our costs to do business are escalating more and more, so we want a longer service life for any foodservice equipment we deploy. Our facilities will continue to shrink, too. The larger the facility is, or the more steps staff have to take, the higher the cost. We have to learn how to execute in the most efficient way possible.
We recently built a coffee shop, and in doing so, we counted the steps our team members take to increase efficiency. In the foodservice landscape, you have kitchens and servery design that enable you to use less staff to operate multiple menu platforms. This type of thinking will impact design. We also have to be aware of sustainability-related issues. There could be a time in New York State where we can only have electric kitchens. We have to understand how that impacts the firepower of our cooking equipment and our ability to serve customers. It will also impact areas like warewashing. There’s a lot of change management in all of this and it has to be done well.
Q: RIT’s campus population is diverse. What’s the secret to creating a sense of community through food for such a global group?
A: First and foremost, it’s a cultural mindset and it starts at the top. You have to continually understand your demographics and want to be inclusive. There’s a bunch of ways we approach that. Some of it is volunteering. I serve as a guest lecturer, and being around students outside of foodservice gives me a pulse as to how things are going. We have 1,200 student employees, and we can get a lot of feedback from them about how things are going. We have to be very strategic in infiltrating areas of influence. As an example, our leaders take academic advisors, resident advisors and others to lunch/dinner to get their takes about successes and opportunities for our operations. Food is about building community, so this is an easy conversation starter. We just take it to a different level.
We have a population of almost 19,000 people, so you can’t communicate with everyone, but you can work with areas of influence to get a feel for how things are going. You are not going to have a perfect meal or perfect day every day, but when you build your brand properly, people will give you the benefit of the doubt.
Q: What’s one thing that you hope to try on campus soon?
A: The things that come up now, some are operational and others are inspirational. We get feedback from customers in a variety of ways. With the more informal ways of gathering feedback, it’s hard to collect the data. We want to find ways to collect that data and even build an advisory organization so we get the information early in the term and not at the end. I would like to implement a feedback mechanism using technology.
Also, we have 21 locations on campus, but what we don’t have is a formal commissary. Each location receives its own goods and does its own prep. Down the road, by adding central production, we can scale ourselves and even build new and different locations because we won’t need as much space.
