Top accomplishment this year:
Working with our team to revamp all our menus to reflect a focus on fresh and local items, resulting in students selecting almost 1.5 million entree salads for lunch last year.
What would you say you excel at over more seasoned employees?
I am pretty resilient when it comes to change. I’ve been in the school foodservice industry for more than six years and have seen so many regulatory changes. I’ve learned to quickly figure out what we need to do to make our menus meet these new regulations but still taste great to appeal to students.
What keeps you up at night?
Product changes! Last school year seemed to be the year of the recall. Every time we turned around, we would receive notification of another food item being recalled. It really gets hard to keep track of your menus when you have to make last-minute changes—and finding enough product to substitute for more than 150 schools is no easy task.
What do you value most in a workplace? Are there any ways your workplace delivers on that?
It is important to be able to laugh. Foodservice can be so stressful at times with so many moving parts. I really value working with people who are happy and can take a step back and laugh sometimes. Chartwells will occasionally host activities like field days, where we go out and compete in water balloon tosses, hula hooping, musical chairs and other activities that create lots of laughs.