This month we present our fourth annual list of 10 ideas to provide a jump-start for innovation in your operation.
Food truck reaches underserved customers - Central Health System, Lynchburg, Va.
The Centra Nutrition Group recently launched our very own food truck, called Code Fresh. The truck serves a few roles. First, we provide retail café services to Centra employees who work offsite in facilities that don’t have access to a café. Second, we use the truck on weekends for community events. Third, it serves as a component of Centra’s disaster response team.
Study abroad care packages - Boston University, Boston
About two years ago, a Boston University (BU) student who was studying abroad tweeted that she missed the cookies from one of our dining halls. Since I oversee the social media for Boston University dining services, and we’re very active on Twitter, I saw the tweet and thought it was great that they missed us and how cool it would be if I could surprise them with those cookies. So I found out the student’s address overseas and put a package together of the cookies and a few other items, and that’s how this care package program started.
Interactive training in dietary restrictions - Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
Cornell Dining senior management, including myself, participated in a five-day challenge to eat at campus facilities while following one of six specific dietary restrictions: vegetarian, vegan, dairy free, gluten free, kosher, and dairy and gluten free.
RWJ Live! brings the variety - Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, New Brunswick, N.J.
We had an old pizza station that we wanted to convert, but we had to try to figure out how to do the next big thing without the capital dollars to do anything big. We decided to take a road trip and visit a number of contract-run hospitals to see what their foodservice trends are. What we saw was several new hospitals that are going with the station concept: paninis, Asian, sushi, pasta, etc., each with its own station. We needed to create that station idea without adding new stations.
BYO burrito concept - Douglas County School District, Castle Rock, Colo.
Earlier this year we piloted a build-your-own-burrito concept called Chef Doug’s Burrito. Doug is for Douglas County. We launched it at Thunder Ridge High School and then moved it onto another school. I would say at each school we’re selling 110 a day, and that’s with a soft opening. We haven’t done a lot of marketing because we wanted to make sure the program was solid and everything operated well. We now have plans to roll it out in nine more sites.
The purée alternative - Grind Dining, Atlanta
Gorham: The Arbor Co., operators of senior living units based in Atlanta, hired us last year as consultants to come up with a solution for residents who have chewing or cognitive disorders and cannot use utensils when they eat.
Morris: We had never been involved with senior care, but Mary Campbell Jenkins, Arbor’s VP of operations, knew we were chefs and asked if we could help. Sarah went in and did an observation, and what she saw was disheartening and depressing. The solution, for most people with such problems, was simply soft foods: scrambled eggs, mashed potatoes, etc.
After-school snack program - Plum Borough School District, Pittsburgh
The students in high school have such a long day and so many of them participate in after-school activities and a lot of them eat lunch starting at 10 a.m. You have to have fuel for athletes to perform at their best levels and they’re high school kids, so they are probably not thinking about packing something in the morning when they are rolling out of bed. We really don’t have any vending machines in the district. Our high school is situated such that they can’t get into a car and get to a convenience store. So I had a captive audience and had a need to fill.
Creating a community destination - Devon Energy, Oklahoma City
We moved into a new 50-floor building in 2012. Devon wanted to be more than just a company located downtown; we wanted to be a community member, and this new building helped us accomplish that.
Partnering for health - University of Arizona Health Network, Tucson, Ariz.
When we combined the food and nutrition services departments back in December 2013 and I assumed leadership over foodservices, I was able to use my experience as an R.D. to begin offering more healthy and specialty food options to our retail customers. We had just hired a new vice president of patient experience, Julie Kennedy Oehlert, and we wanted to improve the healthy quality of our meals. We attended a cooking class that Dr. Andrew Weil was doing in the community, and we thought he could help. He is a well-known name in the community and has an outstanding reputation. I had actually met him a few years ago and partnered with him as a dietetic intern. So we approached him and asked if he would work on our patient and retail menus.
Unmanned micro-markets - Florida Blue, Jacksonville, Fla.
We were looking for something for our smaller sites, the ones that are too big to be supported by traditional vending but not large enough to support a café without a very substantial investment. We opened a couple of micro-markets in late 2010/early 2011 for some of our offices in Tampa and Orlando, and they worked very well. From there, we’ve continued using t