The University of Connecticut, in Storrs, has rolled out a line of healthful packaged items called Spa Foods. The idea man behind the launch, Dennis Pierce, director of dining, speaks about the process he and his team went through to get the concept off the ground.
Dennis Pierce, director of dining services at the 20,000-student university in Storrs, Conn., talks about the process his team goes through to create a retail product.
“I don’t believe I’ve yet to see anyone, whether it be in the retail business or in any kind of college or university, that has tried to capture this concept of mimicking those recipes that are being served at day spas or high-end spas. Not only is it trendy, but the name of it has staying power. It’s not going to grow old.
This began as a thought at my kitchen sink as I was washing dishes. So we got our think tank together, which would consist of someone from marketing, a manager from culinary development, someone that handles our financial system for the pricing piece, and of course our dietitian and someone from our production kitchen. And we sat around and said, ‘Okay, now how can we make this happen?’ We put our heads together and we came up with this concept called Spa Foods. The team went out and researched online for some recipes that were out there, they looked at some of the items Starbucks is offering now in their retail, and they came up with a list of items: some of them had been successful, some of them had been dogs. Some of them were simple. Some of them were simple with a twist.
We’re now doing the assessment piece, finding out what works and what isn’t working. We’re also stepping back and saying, ‘What are we missing?’ We’re going to go back to our customer base to find out if there are any items that we’re not offering that they’d be interested in.
The process takes teamwork. Over the last year and a half since I took over this position, I’ve reorganized the department, building certain positions specifically for these kinds of initiatives. So that now we take every constituent we have out there together to bring this thing to life. It’s neat to see people get together and say, ‘Wait, we can do this?’ and get all excited. They say, ‘How about this? How about that?’ Everybody just takes it on, going from the original thought to a really neat looking logo and nice marketing POS material. So everybody buys into it and they feel good about it because we made a successful product.
This was probably the first product line that we did that with. Everybody started to realize their role in the product line and it paved the way for other, future ideas as we look for how to stay fresh and on the cutting edge.
What’s next? We started seeing these things on the market, these [salad] dressing spritzers. But I don’t know of anyone in the college market that’s doing it or selling it retail. So we sat down last week and said, ‘We need to bottle our own, because it takes nothing to make it.’ So we’re working on that right now, on several varieties that we can prototype in our dining halls to see what works and what doesn’t work. Then we can extend it, and put our own labeling on the bottles.
There are a lot of pieces to look after when you start producing in a central location and then distributing. You have to ensure all your safety issues, like food handling and maintaining temperatures in the refrigerated trucks—which is something that 10 years ago we never worried about, but now we’ve got a health inspector on campus who helps make sure we stay squeaky clean and then some. I think most important is you have to look at consistency. I know that when we started to do our sandwiches and salads for our coffee shops that became an issue. It’s like McDonald’s. If the customer buys a sandwich at one of our coffee shops, and then wants the same sandwich another day, you want to make sure that it tastes the same and looks the same each time.”