Day Three
Wednesday was the day I began working on one of my projects for the Convenience Store in Wilkerson, one of UND's main dining halls. My main goal was to get Guiding Star rating signage for those products stocked by the C-Store that received stars, to increase consistency of the nutritional information for the entire UND foodservice. I used the Guiding Stars website to check which products stocked in the C-Store earned stars, and created a spreadsheet to note them. Some of the products weren't in the Guiding Stars database, so I'll need to send information about these in next week -- there is a very specific photographing procedure the company needs us to do in order to process the nutritional information about these products. Eventually, many of the products stocked in the C-Store will get guiding star tags. I did this same process for the vending machines, as well.
Wednesday I also sat in on another Menu Planning meeting, where we finalized the spring menu for the other residence dining location. I took a more active role in this one, looking up recipes and entering the edits into the menu spreadsheet. Menu planning is still one of my favorite activities, probably because I love thinking up flavor combinations and "what would go well with what". It also never fails to make me hungry. Perfect, because lunch always comes right after!
Day Four
Thursday I started working on another project. This one is for one of the retail locations on campus called Stomping Grounds at U-Place, an on-campus apartment complex. Stomping Grounds serves Starbucks coffee drinks, smoothies, paninis, subs, baked goods, and also has many convenience items. I worked with Laura, a student employee for Dustin who works in the Nutrition dept. on various projects. She's my age and also a dietetics major, and I've really enjoyed getting to know her through this project. Our goal for this project is ultimately to get all of U-Place's offerings on the web so customers can view their nutritional information. In order to do this, we have to get all of the recipes in food pro, then assign them all to the proper location, and food pro will sync the particular menus to the web. It's pretty slick, but getting all of the recipes correct is proving to be a very detailed process! First, we had to go over to U-Place and measure out each ingredient for the smoothies since food pro requires that each ingredient be listed as lbs, qts or each. Then, we had to enter everything in food pro. Each ingredient has a particular inventory number, and it took some time to make sure we were entering the correct ingredients. In the process, we realized that some of the already-entered recipes had changed, so we adjusted those, too. So it's a very detailed process, but I'm learning a lot about what it takes to convert a home recipe into a foodservice recipe.
Thursday I also finally got my official U-Card! Feels good. Although I definitely chose the wrong day to wear my hair up. Oh well, can't win them all.
Friday! I spent the first half of Friday attending various meetings with Dustin. The first was with Lynette in accounting and Kristin in marketing who are all working with Dustin to plan the Food Pro conference that UND is hosting in late July. I'm really looking forward to helping out with this since event planning is one of my true loves. A lot of people from universities across the country will be attending, including NACUFS schools where many of you interns are! :)
The second meeting was a Senior Management meeting for those in Dining. Many things were brought up including the Fiscal Year budget, salary administration, new hires, etc.
I was able to observe Deb, one of the warehouse managers, go through an invoice for Henry's Foods (the main supplier for the retail locations) and fix anything that did not automatically interface with food pro, like split cases or new items. It's amazing how helpful Food Pro is in every aspect of dining at UND, and I can hardly imagine how it was possible to stay organized before systems like this. Still, even with the help of technology, warehousing requires a huge attention to detail to fix these minor errors -- without fixing them, inventory would become disorganized and Food Pro would be inaccurate, completely losing its purpose. Everything is very linked together -- mistakes in one step of the process definitely affect every other step down the road. Thinking about it this way, Dining is kind of like a team -- each department has its very unique role that is absolutely essential if the team is going to be successful.
For the rest of the day, I continued to work on the projects I began earlier in the week. I created a bare-bones menu in Food Pro for U-Place and organized each recipe into categories so that it would make sense online. I'll eventually have to go in and adjust some of the recipes so they are accurate for the location, since some of the items are also served at other retail locations but might be made slightly differently.
Weekened
It's finally the weekend and it feels good to have a few days off. Although I find myself constantly thinking about next week and work that needs to be done ;).
It is supposed to start raining later today and continue tomorrow, so I'm sure I'll get a lot of GRE studying accomplished (maybe). Last night, I drove downtown and went to see a movie as a little treat to myself. I saw The Internship (what a coincidence I didn't even think about the title, just knew I had been wanting to see it) and it had some good laughs. Wasn't anything too amazing, but it was a cute, lighthearted movie and I liked it. Saturday is the first farmers market of the summer, as well as Grand Forks' Art Festival. I traveled down there this morning to check it out. There wasn't much for fresh produce yet (at all) but a lot of the artists had some pretty neat art. I didn't buy anything today, but might go down again tomorrow and get something nice :)
Next week, I'll definitely try to take more pictures during the day!
Glad you are having fun girly!
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