PROJECT MANIA

WEEK 6: KENNESAW AND PROJECT FUN

Monday: Kennesaw State Trip

We started off week six with a field trip to a nearby school also hosting NACUFS interns; Kennesaw State University (about an hour and twenty minutes away). This was the first time Kris (our internship coordinator) got to interact with other interns at a nearby school so it was a first time for all of us. We arrived at their one and only all you can eat dining facility called The Commons. The dining hall holds over 1200 students which may seem like a lot, but when it is your only all you can eat facility you need a lot of space. Kennesaw State University is a smaller university than UGA and only recently has it seen so much growth. There was not much of a need for an on campus dining commons until a few years back  (opened in August 2009) because the first dormitories were not even built until the early 2000’s. With recent growth and development in their school they added more seats to The Commons as well as adding more facilities around campus and plans for a new dining common facility are in the works.

 Driving to Kennesaw State (near Atlanta)

 A picture of Kennesaw State's Campus

We started off our trip to Kennesaw by taking a tour of The Commons. The set up is similar to all of the dining commons at UGA, but the appearance reminded me most of The Village Summit. There are different service stations that offer different types of cuisines or styles of cooking. At their one station Apron Strings they offer home-style cooking and we got to try their homemade hot sauce made by the interns at Kennesaw. During the tour we talked about their sustainability efforts within their dining services which I thought was very interesting because not many schools make such an effort to be environmentally friendly and use their facilities to the best of their ability.  Something that they do as far as sustainability is concerned is they have 10 hydroponic units. So I am sure you have the same thought as I did, what is a hydroponic unit? It is where the process of growing plants in sand, gravel or liquid, with added nutrients, but without soil and they get their liquid from their rain water takes place. The whole process has three steps: germination, propagation, and cultivation and The Commons produces about 600 lettuce heads every three weeks from this process. I thought this whole idea was so interesting because I have never heard of anything like it and it was actually taking place in the dining facility. Kennesaw State also uses a Bio Composter which turns plate waste into nutrient rich water used for farm irrigation for KSU’s farm-to-campus-to-farm program. The Commons also has an herb garden in the back which we got to see. Unfortunately there was not much there because the excess rain had killed a lot, but we got to see where they grow their mushrooms (in tree stumps).

One area of the Commons

 A view of their serving space

 Where their mushrooms grow!!

 Hydroponics 

After we toured the Commons we got to sit down and speak with Rob who is their Meal Plan Manager about managing their facilities (University Staff). The unique thing about Kennesaw State is that they are not operated by the university , but by Sodexo. In most cases this means that Sodexo will run your food service facilities and all the cost will be on them, and you will receive a share of their profit, but that is not the case for Kennesaw State. They have a unique relationship/contract with Sodexo which allows them to have more say in the daily operations of their facility, but it does come at a price. Instead Sodexo taking on all of the cost, it is now Kennesaw’s job to take on the cost and pay Sodexo. It was very important to have this relationship because Kennesaw’s dining service wanted to ensure the highest quality of food and not sacrifice it for the bottom line. Working with a contracted food-service company can have both its pro’s and con’s. A pro of working with a company like Sodexo is the monetary value; they can help with the initial costs of investing in building a new facility. That is a major pro, especially for Kennesaw State because they are in the process of this. With pro’s comes con’s and in this case it is the fact that they do not have a say in who they hire. Sodexo is in charge of the hiring and firing and do not consult the with Kennesaw State staff at all. I was shocked to hear one of their best employees was late three times and it not okay by Sodexo so they fired her and did not even inform management at the university! It was very enlightening to learn about a university food service operation that was not entirely affiliated with the school, but instead a contracted company. It will be something I think of in the future when I am looking for a career and what challenges may come my way within a job.

We finished off our day by taking a tour on golf carts around campus to all the different retail types of food service. The trip started off very funny when Meghan freaked out by a giant spider on our golf cart…sorry Meg.

THE SPIDER!!!!

We went to various facilities and learned about their past and future as a food service operation. The one location we visited was called the Hoot and they were doing a smoke test because when it was originally built the ventilation system was built to handle breakfast foods. The Hoot changed into more of a grill location and the ventilation was not effective enough and it was starting to become bothersome to the residents who lived above the facility. We continued to travel around and saw their union building which has had some renovation and will continue to. One thing that was interesting is that they use the Coke Freestyle machine in most of their locations, but when UGA asked to do it Coke said no. The final facility we saw was one they are renovating into a yogurt/crepe place as well as Starbucks operation! It was great touring another school and to see the similarities and differences. In my opinion the biggest difference besides Sodexo is the size and how many students they are use to serving on a regular basis.

 THE HOOT

 Part of the Berlin Wall (Random but Cool)

TUESDAY: FLOWER and BUILD CHARTS

Tuesday started off with banquet planning. Bryan picked Meghan and I up and we headed over to the flower shop where I was COMPLELETY out of my element. I have never known anything more than a rose, so I was very overwhelmed. The employee there was very nice and patient and gave us time to talk and try our best to picture arrangements (not my strength).  THANK GOODNESS FOR MEGHAN! In the end we decided to go with dark blues, yellow, and white to try and stick to our Under the City Lights theme. We figured the dark blues would emulate the night sky and yellow would be sort of the lights and white would balance it out. For the banquet we have to do 4 big arrangements for the buffet tables as well as about 80 smaller arrangements for the tables. We found very simple clear glass vases at The Summit we will use for the individual table arrangements and have decided to go with lilies (both yellow and white) and blue delphinium. For the larger arrangements we are doing dark blue hydrangeas, larkspur, and yellow and white lilies. I am both excited and nervous to see how they turn out because this is my first experience with picking out flowers for arrangements.

 FLOWER PICKING

MORE FLOWERS

In the afternoon Meghan and I began to work on our build charts for Gregg and The Niche. They are going to start doing soft openings so it is really important that we get theses done. We worked on PowerPoint and made our own shapes to create images to go along with step by step directions. Although it was frustrating at times it was a successful way of compiling the build charts. This took us all afternoon and until we left so we had to continue finish them up on Wednesday.

 Meghan talking to Gregg

Our Bacon Cheeseburger Creation

WEDNESDAY: O HOUSE and PROJECT

In the morning Meghan and I headed over to OHOUSE to learn about menu maintenance from Rob, the unit manager at O HOUSE. First we went to the service records and inventory because Rob wanted to show us a bit about forecasting. We learned that if you do not know the quantity then you put in 0 which will read in the system as not accurate date and keep things the same. He showed us the cost report and informed us that if something is red it is 5% or more about average, and if it is blue it is 5% or more below average. If this arises then you can go through and see why this is the case, it is very common for it to be above when it includes a beef item or special menu item.

Menu Maintenance is what drives the ordering down the line as well as controls what menu items appear on their website when students are trying to build their plate. Rob uses menu maintenance about once a semester and for special events. It is very necessary to have all the information available and properly named so it is user friendly on the other end, because in this case the end user is the customer. There are three categories Average Consumption Items (ACI), standard menus, and cycle menus. ACI’s are things such as ketchup packets and syrups which are things that you ‘just use’ and are not recipe related. Currently these items are not in the FoodPro, so they do not appear on the website.

Next, Rob taught us how to enter the menu items into FoodPro for the cycle menu items so that appears properly on the website. To find the correct day to enter menu items you have to use three different numbers. The first number in the menu is the cycle (summer=5. Fall=8, spring=7). The middle two numbers is your day (01, 02, 03), and the final number is the meal period (1=breakfast, 2=lunch, 3=dinner). We then looked at the menu and reviewed what items needed to be changed in FoodPro due to adding an item to the menu or taking it away. When you have to add to the menu the item is highlighted in green, and when you have to take it out it is highlighted in yellow. Something to keep in mind when doing menu maintenance is that you do not delete an item until you add the new item because you may have to go off of the old acceptability factor. Whoever inputs the data also has to be sure to make sure there is the name in the print as column or no name will appear on the website. The most important thing you need to remember is to make it user friendly!!! Finally, after learning about it all Rob let us enter a day into FoodPro so we could apply our knowledge.

In the afternoon Meghan and I continued work on our projects. We finished up the build charts which look great! We then continued to work on other Niche projects such as compiling safety signs and making menu cards for their market section. For the menu cards we labeled the top of each page with the cycle day and then named the three entrees and accompanied it by a picture and we did the same with the three sides. Although these tasks took us a lot of time  (and were frustrating at parts) it felt good to get them done and know that we were impacting the future of The Niche as well as helping them for their soft openings.

 Safety Signs

 Build Chart!

Menu Pictures

THURSDAY: CREATIVITY

In the morning we were off to Hobby Lobby which is basically a huge Michael’s so we could spark our creativity for banquet decorations. We walked around the store for about two hours picking things up and trying to figure out how they would work as well as costing things out. We found some ideas for our single arrangements on the tables. We want to incorporate our city theme by putting street signs (from all the cities) in the center pieces. Meghan and I were able to find measurements and came up with an alternative way to make them.

After our Hobby Lobby adventure we worked on prints for our decorations and our menu cards. We are going to have 5 large images of different cities when the students first walk up the stairs so we had to select those images and make sure that they had a good enough resolution so they could blow up. We then decided for our menu cards that based on the dish/city we were going to have a picture of landmark/skylines on the card with the menu item written underneath and make it look like a postcard. After we compiled and designed all fourteen of those we moved onto our framed images. Part of our décor is going to be a path decorated with glowing light tubes alternating framed pictures of landmarks. This task was a lot more frustrating and time consuming than I had thought because we would find pretty images with terrible resolution, but in the end we found some pretty beautiful shots.

FRIDAY: PUTTING TOGETHER THE PIECES

Friday is when we compiled all of our The Niche mini projects into a binder for Gregg. We divided it into sections so it would be easy to find the information he is looking for. Along with compiling the binder we went over to The Summit to talk with Adam about our decorations. We shared our ideas on decorations and collaborated with him to figure out the best way to do things. Next week we are going to start building things/ testing some ideas out—so more information to come on our decorations.

Prepping the binder

The Final Product

REFLECTION: This week Meghan and I had a lot of time to ourselves to get things done. We could have totally flopped or excelled, and I think we excelled. We had good time management and spaced all of our tasks out evenly so we could get things done. It was a week full of team-work which I love!

WEEKEND: We got to go to explore the World of Coke and the Atlanta Aquarium with Nicole Lovely (a manager at Snelling). It was a lot of fun and we had a lot of laughs and to top it off we  got AMAZING burgers from a place called The Vortex for dinner!!

Meghan and I outside The World of Coke

 Coke Models

 With the coca-cola bear

 The Aquarium