Summer 2013... NACUFS Intern Style!: UGA week 6: Project Time

Field Trip!

On Monday we got to take a field trip to Kennesaw State University! We toured there dinning courts and retail facilities.We even got to meet their NACUFS interns. There were many differences at Kennesaw from UGA. First major difference was Kennesaw is operated by an outside company, Sodexo. Most arrangements with a company like Sodexo, would have Sodexo running the operation and paying Kennesaw a fee. However Kennesaw has a special contract with Sodexo, where they pay Sodexo a fee. There is an advantage of the special contract Kennesaw has, even though they pay a fee, doing it this way allows them to have more joint responsibilities with Sodexo over things like menu selection and food quality.
Another difference I noticed was that Kennesaw produces a percentage of the produce they use on their farm. Kennesaw also has new pods, called hydroponics, in their dinning courts, where they are growing lettuce. Kennesaw also inoculates logs with fungus to grow mushrooms, behind their building. They have a great emphasis on using fresh products and more locally grown products.

Hydroponic chamber, growing lettuce

Another large difference at Kennesaw was that they only have one dinning court, there large dinning that seats over 1200 students. They plan to open an additional dinning court in 3 years. They are also trying to allowing student to use there meal plans at retail locations, starting this fall. This will help them accommodate more students on campus until they get there next dinning court opened.

Inoculated logs to grow mushrooms

Southern Cuisine concept station

Piece of the Berlin Wall

At the Beautiful Kennesaw campus

Flowers and More

On Tuesday we had the day to work on our projects. We spent a good portion of our day working on our closing banquet project. In the morning Bryan Haymans, a unit manager for the Summit, took us to the whole sale flower store, to pick out flowers for our banquet. Picking out flowers was a bit of a challenge for us. Neither of us have any experience selecting flowers and making arrangements. We had to keep in mind the theme of the banquet colors. Since our theme is "Under The Stars, Coast to Coast", so we wanted dark blues and yellows and white flowers, like the dark blue sky with white and yellow as the stars.
Since we didn't know anything about flowers we picked large dark blue flowers for our large centerpieces for the buffet tables. We are using blue Hydrangeas for the majority of those centerpieces with pops of yellow and white lilies. We also added white larkspur to add height to the arrangement. I learned from the flower arrangements they had at the opening banquet, that you need to have alternating heights of flowers.
We will have smaller flower arrangements on each table. For these smaller arrangements we are using while and yellow lilies with blue delphinium. The white and yellow lilies are a great pop of color that tie back in with our theme well.
Along with making this flower decision, we also had to make the decision on the colors of linens and napkins we wanted. We decided to go with black table clothes and white napkins to keep that upscale elegant city feel.
After this we spent more of our day working on the project for The Niche at Scott Hall as well as sketching out the details of all the decorations we wanted for our banquet.

O-House and Food Pro

On Wednesday we went to O-House dining court to meet with manager Rob Irwin. Rob showed us how to use the menu maintenance function of food pro. First you have to make sure you keep up with updating your service record and inventory. If you are putting in a patron forecast or service record or inventory and enter zero food pro will not factor that in, food pro will simply rule to be inaccurate data.
There are three sections that food pro, to categorize menu items in. First is "ACI" which stands for Average Consumption Items, these are things like Ketchup, cereal, and bagels. Next is the "standard menu" which are items that are served everyday, such as Pasta, marinara, sweet potato, and baked potatoes. The third type of menu is "cycle menu" this menu rotates each fall, spring and summer. Once there is an item that you serve frequently for years you will get accurate data through years of menu maintenance,forecasting patrons and inventory, then you will know how much you will need to order of this item. Once you have years of this data for an menu item you can move it from your standard menu or ACI menu.
Menu maintenance is important for driving ordering down the line. Things to keep in mind with ordering, is that you want accurate information, since you can order food from central 5 days a week, you don't want to have a large inventory above what you need. For O-house, they don't want an inventory above $26,000 at any given time. Menu maintenance is also important for getting the right information on the website. This way when customers use the website to see what each dinning court is offering they have the right information. This is also helpful when they use the "build my plate" feature on the UGA food service website. You want to make sure all foods are correct and in the correct categories to make the Build my plate, feature helpful and easy to use.

We spent our afternoon getting to work on our project for The Nice at Scott Hall. It was simply hours or excel, work and making our own clip art. We learned lots of patience during our experience use these programs. It was also so helpful to have each other, so when one of us got to burnt out the other could help with a new idea. Colleen was always good at providing comic relief for me, whenever I was getting burnt out.

working with build charts

Office work, calling to check various parts of our project.

Inspiration Station

On Thursday we had time to work on our project. We got to venture out to Hobby Lobby and other craft stores to look for inspiration for the decorations for our banquet. We also had to make sure the ideas we already had could be executed and how we would make each idea happen. We wrote down what materials we would need and if it would be affordable. Some of the trouble we ran into was the items we found that we wanted to use at Hobby Lobby would be to expensive for us to make 80. We are planning to have 80 tables and therefore 80 centerpieces.
We plan to make a few examples of our street sign center pieces to make sure they will hold up correctly with the materials we are hoping to use. We have the dimension and materials we want to use. We hope to make some on Monday and see how they hold up.

We spent the rest of the day, afternoon and night on Thursday, laying out every print we would need to make all of our decorations. We spent all night finding different pictures of landmarks and skylines from each city for our menu cards and our poster decorations.

our vision is to have our menu cards match our napkin holder tags , and look like postcards from each city. We found so many beautiful pictures and we are very happy with the way the menu cards look.

Example of the size we want for our centerpieces

making menu cards

Full speed ahead

On Friday we finished our project for the Niche at Scott Hall. After many hours hemming and hawing with excel, clip art and word. This project is finished, and best of all we are very proud of how it came out. In this binder we made the temperature charts for cold and hot foods at the Niche, as well as all the refrigerators and freezers at the Niche. Inside the binder we also made signs about employee hand-washing and what symptoms to report to your manager when you are sick. Finally we added Build charts, that give instructions and pictures on how to assemble each food on the Niche menu. We also labeled each photo they had of the all foods they will make at the Niche, to use as a reference for how those plated foods should look.
In the afternoon we went over to the summit, where we will be having our banquet, and showed Adam our sketches for the decorations we have planned for the space. We went over problems that may arise with some of the decorations we wanted, and what materials we already had that we could use.

Finishing the Binder for the Niche

Final binder for the Niche

Build chart for The Niche

Things Go Better With Coca Cola

On Saturday, one of our wonderful co-workers, Nicole Lovely, was kind enough to take us to see more of Atlanta. Since it was gloomy and rainy all Saturday, it was the perfect day for our Atlanta adventure, since all the places we were going to see were indoors.

First we went to The World Of Coke ,which was my personal favorite. The first thing they do is tell you about their philosophy of the ways to stay happy, in their "Happiness Factory Theater." I really enjoyed listening to the keep points of their philosophy, which were: Live in the moment, put your smile on, choose to be optimistic, focus on friends and family, money doesn't buy happiness, forgive and forget, help others be happy, don't worry be happy, laugh out loud and feed the soul. They seem to emphasis through out Coca Cola their philosophy of Helping others to be happy. They even had a wall of letters people had written about "their coke story" in which they wrote about how coke had comforted them, or changed their life. It was very inspiring.