3 lessons learned from renovations

A renovation often is an opportunity to re-energize a cafeteria space, but along with fresh designs and new equipment comes hindsight that can be applied to the next project.

Three operators share the lessons they’ve gleaned from recent renovations:

1. Understand your customer

“Understand your customer by completing surveys and focus groups and looking at surveys and trends of your future customers prior to renovating.  Our customers vary socially, and we moved away from traditional long rows of tables and chairs to smaller groupings of tables.”
David P. Harr
Director of Dining Service
University of Findlay, Findlay, Ohio

2. Hands-on equipment

“I wished that I had spent more time seeing the equipment hands-on versus just looking at the specifications. Just because it’s brand-new doesn’t mean that it works perfectly.”
Julie Winters
Director of Food and Nutrition
Boone Hospital Center,
Columbia, Mo. 

3. Draw your vision

“You have this vision, and the designer and consultant have their vision too. That is difficult to marry sometimes. In a critical meeting, we went into the boardroom, drew out what we wanted and said, ‘Develop it.’”
Thomas Thaman
Director of Food and Nutrition
Sidney & Lois Eskenazi Hospital, Indianapolis