Dave Prentkowski: Keeping Notre Dame Growth On-Track

At A Glance: Dave Prentkowski

Foodservice Director

University of Notre Dame, Indiana

•In foodservice since he was 16

•Meal volume: 25,000 daily

•No. of facilities: 24+ sites

•Foodservice Sales: $37 million annually

•Staff he oversees: 55 managers, 300 full-time regular staff and 1,000 to 4,000 part-timers

Slow and steady wins the race, folks say. Well, it has certainly
been a winning formula for the dining services department of the
University of (Ind.) Notre Dame, which has within the past seven to eight
years, doubled its retail sales, doubled its catering sales, and
increased off-campus-student purchases of board contracts by 20%.

Resident
board plans may be static,  mostly because the population is held
static by the university year to year, and having full occupancy each
year, there is no room for growth. But rest assured, customer
satisfaction, as determined through surveys, reveals an increasingly
happy clientele there, as well.

Notre Dame’s dining services
operation serves about 25,000 meals daily, generating about $37 million
annually. The venues include two residence halls that serve literally
thousands of students daily; five restaurants; a convenience store; 12
retail outlets; vending; catering; concessions for athletic areas; and
services provided for the student health center, a childcare center,
two religious residences, a seminary and a nursing home.

The
department is run by about 55 managers overseeing 300 full-time regular
staff and a pool of part-timers that grows to as large as 4,000 people
and only dips to a low of about 1,000 during off-peak times of the
year. The campus features a mix of franchise or commercially branded
concepts and house brands, including the c-store, a 24-hour day
restaurant, and UND’s own Mexican concept, Buen Provecho. There are
about 7,500 students on meal plans.

“We’ve done some
significant strategic planning for the department that took a lot of
years to actually implement,” says David Prentkowski, the university’s
foodservice director.

Central production: An outgrowth of those
years of strategizing and a major contributor to the success of the
university’s foodservices operation is its central food production
facility. It opened six years ago and effectively solved many of the
problems presented in running an operation of this scope. The facility
combined the production and support for both retail and board dining
under one roof. The department made this critical move when faced with
the challenge of serving customers who were looking to the university
to provide on-trend foodservices, without having the luxury of more
space to accommodate the growing demands.

“It allowed us to
become more efficient in our production, because we are utilizing more
modern equipment and technology,” Prentkowski explains. “We are
performing in a more streamlined fashion, and it also allowed us to
remove some functions from the main dining halls on campus and open up
some square footage to expand the menu and variety of food that we
offer.”

Moving prep space from the dining hall to the central
facility made room for dining services to create a food market boasting
several stations including pizza, pasta, deli, soup, stir fry, grill,
carving, Mexican, salad and dessert. It also made display cooking and
cook-to-order stations possible.

Prentkowski says the success
of the central food facility is also demonstrated in the way it seemed
to breed an entrepreneurial mindset in the staff. Employees found
opportunities to be more efficient and add more value to menus and the
units. “The staff has been a tremendous asset to the operation,” he
asserts. For example, the staff brought bagel production in-house,
saving the department money while providing customers with a
higher-quality product.

Evidence of success is also found in
customer satisfaction and sales, he reports. Dining services does
Web-based random surveys that have revealed, he says, that students are
indeed happy with the services provided.

Strategic placement:
Prentkowski’s approach to determining how to best meet customers’
needs  has been calculated and deliberate—what he calls a
market-oriented approach. The campus is divided by market, and he
develops and places concepts according to customer base and activity in
that particular locale. The department uses research to understand the
market demands and match the best types of food outlets for that
demographic.

“Our volume has increased because we’ve placed
restaurants in locations that make it convenient for people and we’ve
put together menu offerings that people want to buy,” says Prentkowski.
“We have so many different operations on campus that we have to be
careful not to over-saturate. We look at things individually by
restaurant but we also look at things   campus-wide to make sure there
is a variety of good choices for customers.”

Looking forward,
Prentkowski is hoping to obtain the funding to renovate and modernize
one of the two dining halls. The renovation will be no easy feat, as it
seats 2,000 and serves hundreds of meals daily. “It’ll be expensive to
turn that ship,” says Prentkowski.

He also stands ready to
tweak whatever else needs adjusting as time goes on to ensure that he
keeps customers on-campus during meal times.

“It’s a matter of
continuously evaluating our locations and menus, especially as the
campus changes and buildings are added, offices are moved and
populations are moved,” he says. “We have to grow with the campus.”