On Monday I got to spend the day working with Gloria at the Wilkerson Dining Center. Gloria does all of the vegetable and salad prep for the entire campus! She is very organized and hardworking, and a great person to talk to. We started the morning by taking temperatures of everything that had been pre-cut over the weekend -- onions, celery, carrots, etc. She logs the temperatures of everything made there, aiming to keep them between 33 and 38 degrees for food safety. Since many of the items she prepares are going out to other dining centers and catering events, it is safer to have the temperatures well below the danger zone because of the transit time. We also prepared several salads *inside* the walk-in cooler to ensure that they stay at safe temperatures. I don't think I've ever seen that much macaroni salad all at once! Once the salads were done, Gloria showed me how to prep celery to be chopped. I wasn't very fast at it, but I got most of a box of celery stalks separated and removed all of the leaves, ends and dirt. I have a definite appreciation of Gloria's job there and how quickly she works! Once the celery was all cleaned and wrapped for chopping on Wednesday, I got to start peeling, coring and washing almost 50lbs of onions. I've prepped a lot of onions in the past in working for Subway, so I was a little faster at that -- and also very thankful that the white onions they use did not make me cry at all! We finished the day by peeling and washing a lot of carrots -- it was actually rather relaxing. I remember peeling carrots with my Mom as a kid and it brought back good memories. Working with Gloria was helpful to see how hard work and organization, sticking to food safety concerns while still taking pride and enjoyment in your work can all come together. She is definitely an integral part of dining services here, and it was great to get to work with her.
I also got to sit in on the final interview for the Utility Manager position on Monday. It was interesting to see that each of the managers still had differing views on who they felt would be best for the positions available, but it ended up working out for the best as each manager chose a different candidate that they would like to hire for their facility. The candidate I liked best was chosen as a backup if either of the others should decline the job offer. It was a really valuable experience to be a part of the interview process and to see how well it is done here at UND. Everyone who was interviewed was given a tour of the dining center and welcomed to the facility, and Mary told each of them the timetable for the process of hiring and when they should expect to be notified. I have interviewed people in the past as a manager myself, but did not have the background or knowledge to really understand the process, how to help interviewees feel at ease, know all the appropriate questions to ask, and the qualities that might make for the best candidate.
Tuesday began my work with the Stomping Grounds coffee shop and trying to get all of the nutritional information for their 150+ coffee recipes entered into the FoodPro program so that it can be made available online for consumers. Dustin the dietitian got me set up at the Stomping Grounds in Memorial Union and I was given a list of all of the recipes to go through. Once I got the hang of entering in each syrup, mix, and sauce used, the process went pretty quickly. The flavored syrups are all from the same company so the ingredients for each one are very similar, I just had to be on the lookout for any allergy concerns like nuts, milk, soy or wheat. The biggest lesson I got from the experience was that small errors in the recipe serving size can make a huge difference in the nutritional information and cost! The 12oz mocha recipe had 0.8lb of chocolate topping listed, which along with an issue with the whipped topping originally put the drink in at over 1000 calories! I'm not sure how you can fit almost a pound of chocolate topping into a 12oz drink, but thankfully we caught the mistake. The whipped topping was also difficult to pinpoint, as the unit used in FoodPro was by the can, and the serving size on the can was 2 Tbsp (6g) -- but there are supposed to be 70 servings in one can. With the help of Stomping Grounds' manager Nancy, we came to the decision that they get about 30 hot drinks' worth of whipped topping out of 1 can. For the blended drinks, they use a lot more whipped topping to fill the dome lid, so I multiplied the 1/30th of a can by 4 to get that amount (0.1333 of a can). That's definitely better than the previous estimate that was in the program which showed the blended drinks as having 20 servings of whipped topping apiece (that's about 30g of fat!). It took me all day Tuesday and Thursday to get all of the recipes entered, and there are still a few loose ends to get taken care of, but most of it is completed. Many thanks to Nancy and the other Stomping Grounds employees who answered my random questions, let me use their computer and root around in their products looking at nutrition labels! It will be great once the project is completely online and people can find out just how many calories there are in the drinks there, and hopefully it will lead to their customers making healthier choices and anyone with food allergies being able to make safe choices.
On Wednesday, Mary and my suitemates from South Korea, Angie and Crystal, and I all went down to Fargo, ND for several great tours. Our first stop was at the Food Services of America (FSA) warehouse. FSA is the main distributor for the University of North Dakota dining services. Their facility was really impressive! They keep the entire warehouse at 45 degrees or below, even dry storage and the receiving docks, because they are constantly receiving products. They also distribute food for all of the Subways in the area, so I saw a great deal of familiar Subway products throughout the warehouse. They use a very helpful bar code scanning system, so that the employee picking a product for a customer must read back the bar code for the item and scan it to ensure that they are picking the correct product. Their shelves go up to 5 stories high, which their forklifts can reach up to! In their smaller, lesser used item area, the forklift has to be operated with a person on the deck -- I don't think I would be comfortable riding a forklift up that high! We also got to step in to the freezer area of the warehouse, which was bone-chillingly cold. I can't imagine having to work for an extended period of time in those temperatures. But our tour guide also mentioned that frozen products are one of the things that food companies are expanding on now, because of the technology we have now and the ability to safely move and keep products frozen for an extended period of time without compromising quality. The other highlight of the tour was getting to see the custom meat cutting and processing area of their facility. We couldn't go inside it because of USDA regulations, but we got to look in. They can make any cut of meat for their customers there, and vacuum package it for delivery. Most impressive for me was that they do all of their meat cutting by hand, they just have a bone saw to make special cuts like T-bone steaks. The facility is closely inspected by the USDA for safety, usually multiple times a week. I never knew that foodservice distributors could have a meat processing facility in their warehouses, but it makes sense how that would save them money, waste less product, and also cater to their customers' specific requests. We each got an FSA tote bag full of goodies at the end of the tour too. It was sad to hear about the flooding in Minot, ND and how it is effecting the people and the warehouse FSA has out there though. My thoughts go out to everyone displaced by the flooding.
We had a yummy lunch on Wednesday at the offices of Roisum Elite, a food broker that works with FSA and customers like UND. They made us a delicious grilled tuna salad and turkey & swiss paninis all with products from food companies that they represent. The broker talked to us about their role in promoting new products to customers and ensuring that distributors like FSA will carry them. Previously, I did not have a very clear idea of what a broker does in the foodservice industry, but they answered all of the questions we had. I was really curious about what kind of role nutrition plays in their industry and whether they see a lot of customers requesting healthier options. It still seems to boil down to the problem of how do food companies make healthier choices more attractive and desirable than all of the junk food options that are out there? I'm not sure what the answer to that is. But it was good to hear that they do see a lot more interest in sustainable products than they used to, and that is something they actively pursue with their suppliers. They also take an active role in ensuring the food safety of the products they represent and knowing where the food comes from in case of a foodbourne illness outbreak. A food broker's job is much more involved than I previously thought! (And they make some really delicious food!)
For our last stop on Wednesday, we got an extensive tour of the North Dakota State University campus dining services. They are moving from having a centralized bakery to having some bakery satellite units, and moving and updating the main bakery facility with newer equipment. We got to see the current bakery they have which has 2 deck ovens that are almost 100 years old! They also have some newer ovens which are big enough to roll an entire cart into -- that is the style of ovens they are going to have in their new bakery facility. The other interesting feature of the NDSU dining services was that each of their sites has student grills, where the students themselves can come and grill any food they want. Our tour guide even admitted that they have found a number of their good student workers by watching the students at their grills. I thought that was a neat concept which helps cater to the students' needs and also can reduce labor costs. Their newest dining facility was built keeping in mind the flow of food, trying to keep it all going in one direction -- from receiving and storage, to cooking, to serving, to the dishroom -- it all appeared to flow very well without backtracking. This is also an important consideration for ensuring food safety. I was very impressed with all of our tours that day, I am truly thankful to have this experience to get to see so many different areas of foodservice that I haven't personally seen before.
Friday morning I got to shift from the enormous FSA warehouse to a shadowing experience at the more modest UND warehouse facility with the warehouse manager Mike Brown. They got in a delivery from FSA first thing in the morning which I got to see and help them check in. Much like I had to do every week as a Subway manager, they have to match up what is listed on the invoice with the products that are actually received. For the delivery I was there, they were missing a package of butter cups that was on the order invoice. It might seem simple and unnecessary, but I know how critical it is to personally check in all food that is received, from both a food safety and a billing standpoint. They receive a lot more food there than I ever did at Subway, but Mike has employees to help him (a luxury I rarely ever had!), and they can simply move the pallets by forklift directly into a cooler or freezer. It was also interesting to see that some of the pallets were not stacked correctly, and a couple of boxes got smashed. Salad mix should never go on the bottom of a heavy stack of boxes of cheese! While the system at the UND warehouse is not as sophisticated as the computerized bar codes at the FSA warehouse, he maintains a very organized and clean facility that is easy to get around, with every section numbered and clearly labeled. I was very impressed with it. Unfortunately, because of the flooding in Minot there were a few items that FSA was not able to send with their delivery. On Friday, this was liquid eggs and beef ravioli. To ensure that Wilkerson would not run out of these products over the weekend, Mike had to call and order them from US Foods' Grand Forks Grocery (GFG) warehouse. I got to go with him to pick it up and deliver it over to Wilkerson. During the school year, Mike said he has to go down there usually a couple times a week to pick up additional products, or things that FSA may only carry on special order (which can take up to 21 days to deliver).
He also tries to stay on top of the needs for each of the units as he places the food orders for them. I got to observe as he placed an order for the A&W unit here on campus. Knowing that he does not keep an extra bag-in-box of diet root beer syrup in the warehouse because it was expiring before it was being used, he called over to the unit to check and see when the box they had was expiring. It turned out the box expired this coming weekend, so Mike knew to go ahead and order a new one. If he had not called, it would have become an issue that he would have had to deal with later. Clearly he knows his job and does it very well! With so many units to keep track of on campus, it was very impressive that he stays on top of things like that. Before I left the warehouse, I got to help him fill 2 orders for units on campus, using the forms and the numbering system they use to locate items in the warehouse. It was not difficult at all to find the cases of juices and water that were on the order form using Mike's system, and we left them ready to go for delivery to where they were needed that afternoon. You really don't need fancy computer systems and complex bar codes when things are well organized and run by people who know what they're doing and take pride in their work, and in doing it right.
I spent most of the remainder of Friday helping Dustin by entering the fall pizza menu for the Squires dining facility into the FoodPro system. His new pizza menu plan is trying to incorporate a wider variety of pizza recipes into the cycle menu. Previously, they had cheese and pepperoni pizza at almost every meal, and now he is expanding that to offer more chicken, steak, vegetarian and other recipes. They also offer lavosh, calzones, and flatbread pizzas. At each meal there is at least one pizza on multigrain crust and one vegetarian option. I also got to try to predict the acceptability factor for some of the new pizzas they are trying, so they have an idea of how much to prepare. I based it off of the acceptability factors for similar pizzas, or generally 9-11% for new meat varieties, and 3-4% for vegetarian options. Their most popular pizza was pepperoni at over 22% acceptability factor! Hopefully Dustin doesn't get much bad feedback for not having pepperoni pizza at every meal in the fall -- but encouraging variety is good, right?
Overall, I am still amazed by the efforts of everyone on this campus, from the warehouse, to the managers, to the cooks, to the servers, to all ensure food safety. This week has expanded that beyond the campus to the distributors and brokers as well. It is comforting to know that everyone in the chain of food distribution and production is equally as concerned about the health and well-being of their consumers. It is also great to see the interest on campus for nutrition as I work on the Stomping Grounds project. College campuses get such a nutritionally bad reputation with the "Freshman 15" (or more) and it is refreshing to see that UND makes so much nutrition information available and is actively seeking ways to promote awareness of the nutrition facts for their dining services. The main reason I chose this school as one of my top choices for the NACUFS internship was because it was possible to focus the internship experience on nutrition and nutrition-related projects. I feel very lucky and thankful to be here and can't wait to see the finished products once I am done with the experience!
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