Jessica Marchand, R.D.: Empowering Talent

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Jessica Marchand is a collaborator. She believes in giving power to her employees and working with them to solve problems and effect change.

That approach is the major reason why Marchand, the director of food and nutrition at WakeMed Health & Hospitals in Raleigh, N.C., has been able to revive a foundering foodservice program. Under Marchand’s guidance, WakeMed’s menus now sport more variety, chefs have taken control of the menu development process, the catering program has found renewed success and the department is operating in the black.

Take, for example, how she handled her department’s culinary team.

“We had four chefs on staff, but in their positions they were working more in prep and were less involved in the business side,” Marchand says. “They weren’t in our inventory system creating recipes and they weren’t costing things. Through a lot of education with our business analyst, they are now creating and costing recipes themselves. It really empowered them. I feel like we unleashed the talent and they became more engaged and much more vocal, and they are coming to the table with ideas, whereas in the past it was like pulling teeth. They just didn’t feel supported before, and now that we gave them the power to do these things, they’ve just blossomed.”

As a  result, Marchand says, she now has a culinary team that understands the benefit of costing properly. The department has been able to make menu changes such as eliminating a lot of canned items; checking out more cost-effective, but still high-quality, cuts of meat, and looking at different ethnic cuisines. These changes have allowed the department’s revenues to fall more in line with where they need to be, based on what’s going on in the market, Marchand says.

This collaborative style has long been Marchand’s hallmark, according to people who have worked with her.

“She always asked for my input before making big decisions, a style I have carried over into my own management roles,” says Tracey Gaines, regional director of nutrition services at Eastern North Carolina Consulate Healthcare. “We worked together early in my career in the Duke Health System, and I can’t even explain in sufficient detail how much I learned about project management from her during that time. I was always very appreciative of her vision for our operation. It wasn’t just whatever worked for the moment, but whatever would take us to the next level.”

Ed Chan, assistant hospital administrator, support services at Kaiser Permanente in northern California, had a similar experience.

“I worked with Jessica for about two years during her tenure at Aramark,” says Chan. “Although we were peers at different hospitals, we collaborated on several initiatives. Jessica’s sharp analytical mind coupled with her operational proficiency gave her the ability to achieve great results. She’s always been professional and respectful, but also confident and willing to have difficult conversations when necessary.”

Non-commercial from the start

Marchand, who majored in dietetics at the University of Georgia, got her start in non-commercial foodservice when she landed a NACUFS internship at Duke University. After graduation she completed her dietetics internship through the Georgia Public Health Department by working as a public health nutritionist for the Carroll County Health Department. Tanner Medical Center, in southwestern Georgia, offered her a job once her internship was over. After stints with Aramark and other health systems, she landed at WakeMed in 2011.

At WakeMed, Marchand has demonstrated time and again her willingness to work with others to solve problems, to great effect. For example, when the department wanted to remove an outside vendor and create its own deli concept, Marchand approached U.S. Foods for help.

“U.S. Foods has the Metro Deli brand of items and that concept [comes] with some graphics,” Marchand says. “ We worked with them to figure out what [changes could be made] because we really wanted to make [the deli] our own.”

The switch to a manufacturer-branded concept doubled projected revenue in the first year. It also prompted a facelift of the entire cafeteria.

“We had worked with a vinyl wrap company to transform the Metro Deli space, and everyone was so happy with it, we decided to do the whole cafeteria,” Marchand says. “So without a major renovation—we spent about $14,000 total—we were able to transform the look of the cafeteria. For example, we used to have 15-year-old tiles that were black, brown and white. Putting a faux stainless finish vinyl wrap throughout the whole cafeteria brightened everything up and made it a little more modern.”

Developing a catering program

As part of the reorganization of the production team, Marchand created a new, full-service catering program and assigned one chef to take it over. The goal, she says, was twofold: keep more catering dollars in-house—20 outside vendors compete for hospital business—and allow her department to have more control over the nutritionals in the items people were ordering.

“We probably saved the hospital $20,000 by keeping catering internal at a lower price point,” Marchand says. “The branding was a huge collaboration with our PR department. At the same time we were working on catering, we were also changing our patient menus, so we had the opportunity to really establish a brand. PR worked on choosing a font and just creating the same look for all of the materials we produce.”

Marchand and her team marketed the catering program to decision makers by arranging tastings, a move that generated more business.

“The restructuring helped to put the right people where they needed to be to make this successful,” Marchand says. “We do mostly boxed lunches and cold-cut platters for [daytime] meetings, but we’ve also done a lot of high-end events that it would have been difficult for us to pull off before.”

Collaboration and education

Another collaborative effort that has resulted in savings has been Marchand working with her counterpart at Cary Hospital to standardize menus and pricing. Although the Raleigh and Cary campuses are both part of WakeMed, there are two different directors at two hospitals that report to two different VPs. (Leo Jolly is the director at Cary.) This has created inconsistencies that the two directors have worked hard to correct.

“We’ve been working in tandem to make sure that our items are as standardized as possible, so we get the best prices and have the best quality,” Marchand says. “It’s the right way to reduce costs and improve quality. We implemented an inventory meeting that is mandatory for both campuses. It’s run by my analyst, and every two weeks we get together and talk about any items that are changing. For example, we found we were serving two different bacon products, and one of us was paying a lot more than the other. So we got together and chose one product, and that saved us $7,000. It’s great that the silos and walls between the foodservice departments are coming down.”

Within her own department, a focus on education has really helped make the team work better together. The department started offering classes on everything from IT to culinary skills.

“We realized the education and the skill set for our largest group of employees wasn’t at the level we’d like,” Marchand says. “On the production side, we’re going to be offering five mandatory classes and five electives. The mandatory classes will be back to basics such as portioning, waste, garnishing and proper cooking techniques. It will give us a chance to assess where their skill sets are and what we need to address.”

She also wants to reward graduates with a logoed chef coat, similar to the Black Hat Chef program that has been implemented at nearby hospitals, where “graduates”get to sport black hats.

“The success of that program made me realize we needed something more formal,” Marchand says.