In Erie, Pa., winters are especially long, so this winter, the dining team at Allegheny Health Network’s (AHN) Saint Vincent Hospital put their heads together to come up with a creative way to use food to boost spirits.
“Winters, we try and keep staff morale up, you know, people upbeat," said Keith Henderson, Cura Hospitality’s director of food, nutrition and retail services at the hospital. "It’s even more important in this whole COVID fog that we’ve all lived through for the past few years."
With January being National Soup Month and Super Bowl Sunday quickly approaching, Amanda Docter, Cura’s executive chef at AHN Saint Vincent, had the idea for a soup competition called the Souper Bowl.
The team solicited eight soup recipes from hospital staff and put them head-to-head in a weeklong competition, which kicked off on Jan. 23.
It was difficult to build buzz prior to the contest, but once it launched, excitement started flowing, Henderson said: “People had commented after the fact like, ‘Oh, I want to enter my grandmother’s recipe.’”
For $2, participants received two 4-ounce cups of soup and a fountain drink. Afterwards, they were invited to vote on their favorite, rating the soups on both flavor and creativity. The winners then advanced to the next round. Half of the proceeds from the competition went to the hospital’s All for One committee, which sponsors hospital events.
Soup sales nearly doubled on the first day of the promotion, going from around 50 orders to 90, said Henderson. “I think people really responded well."
The soups included varieties such as pepper, pizza and black bean, and were handmade by Lead Cook Jennifer Ciotti, who was tasked with adapting small-batch recipes to meet the volume of the hospital.
During the competition's final day, the two most popular soups—pizza and dill pickle—went head-to-head, with the latter winning the title of Souper Bowl Champion. The soup, whose recipe was submitted by Domenica Babo, the hospital's healthy food center manager, won by a landslide, according to Henderson.
The winning recipe: dill pickle soup.
“There was a lot of curiosity around it,” he said. “We’re definitely going to keep this as an annual event.”
Currently, the team is creating a trophy in the shape of a soup bowl for the contest winner, as well as a plaque that will hang in the cafeteria. The winner also received a $50 dining gift card.
The team has plans to feature the dill pickle soup on the menu throughout the next year.