The Hennessey Awards, sponsored by the National Restaurant Association, recognizes excellence in U.S. Air Force foodservice. As one of the program's travelers Owen Moore, director of dining at New York University, spent a month going from Georgia to Japan visiting and judging Air Force bases.
Last February, Owen Moore represented the Society for Foodservice Management in the Hennessey Awards, sponsored by the National Restaurant Association. The program recognizes excellence in U.S. Air Force foodservice. Moore and two other “travelers,” spent 32 days touring and judging Air Force bases around the world.
“I think that hearing about the Hennessey program from previous SFM travelers certainly raised my interest, because of the experiences you hear about. But I think there were three reasons why I was intrigued. One was the opportunity to see how the military runs their foodservice operations. I’d never had the opportunity to work with the military. I’d heard they have some great processes and procedures and I wanted to look at how they did things. Second was the opportunity to travel and go to locations I would not normally have access to. The international piece of the trip was certainly exciting. And the third thing was just being able to evaluate myself and kind of gauge myself on where I stand in the industry.
Our fellow travelers [from past years] had done a pretty good job of letting us know what it was going to be like. They told us there were going to be some long days, and that you’re on a pretty quick pace. I didn’t anticipate that it was going to be as quick a pace, however. You don’t have any days off. We actually had one day off when we were in Oklahoma, the day of the Super Bowl, because it was a travel day, and then we ended up getting a couple of days off at the end of the trip in Japan. And I don’t consider traveling 32 hours to get somewhere a day off.
I’d never done that much traveling in such a short period of time. We ended up doing 32,000 miles in 32 days. There were some days where we would hit five or six different airports, when we were going from Georgia over to, say, Turkey. And going through customs at the various countries was interesting.
Every base offered a unique experience. But for me personally, there were a couple of bases that stand out. Vanderberg had a lot of impact on me because of the location, on the West Coast, but I also thought that from a delivery standpoint what they do was really top-notch. I thought it was better than a lot of the B&I accounts I’ve seen, and even some of my own oeprations. I also thought very highly of the bases in Turkey and Japan because of the challenges those operations have to deal with every day. I was impressed with those locations for how they had to have a really good operational plan to make sure that they continue to provide services every day, despite sometimes having deliveries only a couple times a week or not being able to get parts for equipment.
Warner Robbins Air Force Base in Georgia has a flight kitchen that is the cleanest facility I’ve ever seen, at any operation at any level, in my entire life. It was impeccable, and it wasn’t brand new. The civilians who ran the operation averaged 10 years or more of service, and the amount of pride they had in their operation was incredible. They told us that a lot of flights will stop at Robbins for maintenance, rather than continue on to D.C., so the crews can get a phenomenal meal at the flight kitchen.”