Hospitality student projects tackle campus dining issues at Indiana

“In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is,” goes the old joke. A group of tourism, hospitality and event management majors at Indiana Universitys (IU) got a real-life version of that distinction when they were asked this past year to apply what they learned in theory to the practice of an actual foodservice operation—campus dining at their university.

The class initiating the innovative project—management of food and beverage operations—was recently developed as a project-based service-learning course by Brandon Howell, EdD, MBA, a tourism, hospitality and event management faculty member in IU’s school of public health. Howell, who also teaches the course, came to IU last year after more than a decade managing hotel and restaurant operations at Walt Disney World in Orlando, where he opened a number of restaurants and was most recently in charge of training for merchandising and F&B for all of Animal Kingdom Park.

“[It] is the first food and beverage course in our curriculum,” Howell says, “and I thought it would be a great opportunity to connect our course with Indiana University’s foodservice program. At times I feel there is a disconnect between academics and operations. This course may serve as a model to help bridge that gap.”

Disney World Restaurants veteran Howell Brandon, EdD, MBA, developed the management of food and beverage operations course that sent teams of students to campus dining locations to evaluate issues and suggest solutions as an academic exercise in a real-world setting.

To get the ball rolling, Howell reached out to the managers of different campus dining locations and asked them to participate.

“I wanted them to come up with [problems] in their facilities and then have the students use the knowledge they are learning in the classroom to try to solve [them by] coming up with a hypothesis, testing out solutions and seeing if their ideas made positive impacts,” Howell offers.

“I thought, ‘Who better to do that than the students themselves because they dine in these halls all the time and they see them every day.’”

The initial class of 67 students was broken into 15 teams of four to five students each. They examined five separate campus dining operations that had agreed to participate in the academic exercise. The problems they were challenged with ranged from food flow and sanitation issues to sustainability/recycling, marketing, operational efficiency, and, especially, training and development issues.

For example, in one instance, they were asked to design marketing solutions to entice students from other parts of campus to check out the newly opened Den by Denny’s station, while in another, they improved ordering and pickup logistics at the popular new Scholars Inn Bakehouse café in the campus library, where chaos initially reigned.

“There was really no [obvious] place to order while you had people standing around waiting for their food,” is the way Howell describes the scene shortly after the popular local concept opened its on-campus location in the library. His foodservice management students were challenged to bring some order to the process in which burgers and other hot food items were being prepared to order, necessitating waits between order placement and pickup.

Those were fairly simple, if typical, real-world foodservice environment challenges for the students, and solutions were found and proposed fairly quickly: stanchions and signage for the library café and social media-based marketing for the Den by Denny’s promotion were the most typical proposals.

A couple of others took a little more time.

For example, the Clubhouse sandwich station, one of nine concepts in IU’s massive Restaurants at Woodland retail cluster, had a problem fulfilling orders quickly. The concept has a menu of some 20 specialty sandwiches, plus accepts customized options, with everything made to order by student workers. The high-traffic concept sees between 800 and 1,000 customers a day on average so efficiency is key, says Linda McCoy, general manager for Restaurants at Woodland.

Customers regularly complained of long wait times for orders at Clubhouse (though their common lament that these regularly lasted 20 minutes or so were not borne out by time studies the foodservice management students assigned to the project conducted, which indicated that waits were actually more in the five- to 10-minute range).

“Student workers are difficult to train because [of] high turnover,” McCoy explains. “I needed some better way to train students on making the sandwiches because they can get really complicated.”

The foodservice management students assigned to evaluate the problem at Clubhouse immediately focused on the build cards posted near the prep tables, which are supposed to guide the workers through the proper assembly of each standard menu item. Unfortunately, they seemed to be causing more confusion than guidance.

“They found them difficult to read [with the] font not very clear, and they noted right away that [the cards] were small and hard to see,” McCoy says. “Their idea was to make big poster-size build cards and place them above the prep table, above the window where customers can’t see the posters but the workers can just look up.”

Each of the specialty sandwiches is quickly identifiable on the poster with a simple graphic: For example, the green giant sandwich card has a picture of a green giant. Sandwich diagrams are also segregated by background color, which identifies the kind of bread to be used (blue for ciabatta, etc.). The font was also changed to one that is clearer and more concise and two sets of each card were posted—one is at the prep table that chooses the bread, protein and cheese, and a second one at the table where the toppings are added, so no one has to crane his or her neck.

The cards went up toward the beginning of March and seem to have facilitated throughput and, consequently, customer satisfaction, though formal measurements have yet to be taken.

“My perception is that the efficiency has greatly improved,” McCoy recently reported. “The staff and customers both seem much more comfortable now.”

McCoy plans to extend the look and style of the new build cards to other instructional signage and training materials to achieve a uniform look across the entire Woodland concept mix, “so no matter where they work, they will see the same design.”

A longer term project the foodservice management class is working on is standardizing aspects of the training of the some 900 student employees.

“We have 25 [dining] locations across campus and one idea the students hit on was consistency of location training so student workers are trained and as comfortable as possible before they begin working lines and serving customers,” says Mike Lamb, training coordinator for IU residential programs and services, who notes that currently, location training is managed separately by the general managers at each site with little consistency.

“We’d like something with some standardized elements everyone can follow that would still be flexible enough to work in a food court like Linda runs with 200 student employees, [as well as in] a small academic café with 10 to 15 student employees.”

One group of students presented a plan that Lamb says he would like to implement for the fall 2017 semester in which student workers would be hired and trained on location in stages, but at the end would need to pass a kind of basic competency evaluation to ascertain whether they will be comfortable or competent to serve customers.

“It will need to be flexible to work at different locations and in different types of operations,” he acknowledges, “but I would like a basic framework that we could use to train students consistently onsite and make more of that opportunity to not only get better service but hopefully also increase our retention rate.”