Cedric Junearick: Reluctant star

At a Glance

Accomplishments

Cedric Junearick has helped transform foodservice at Huntsville Hospital by:

Cedric Junearick, foodservice director for Huntsville Hospital, in Alabama, admits he never really saw himself in the role of foodservice director. A graduate of Johnson & Wales University, Junearick was most comfortable in the kitchen, preparing meals and planning menus. So in 2011, when the director’s position came open, the chef had a hard decision to make.

“When Bill [Notte] left, my first thought was that I just wanted to play the chef role,” Junearick recalls. “My passion was food, and being director meant that I would have to learn the political side of the house.”

But on the flip side, Junearick says, he was already “the face of foodservice” because he had a history with Huntsville. Before the hospital went self-op in 2009, he had worked as executive chef there under Morrison Management Specialists.

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“There were some new players here, but everybody knew me,” Junearick says. “They knew who to come to to get the job done.”

So when administrators came to the chef, he agreed to take on a new role. Junearick now runs the foodservice program at Huntsville Hospital, an 881-bed acute-care facility, and he oversees operations at nine other institutions in the Huntsville system, each of which has its own manager.

Operational success

But for all his reluctance, Junearick has embraced his new job with the same passion he showed in the kitchen. Overseeing an operation that turns out as many as 2,400 patient meals a day and provides a variety of retail outlets for staff and visitors, Junearick has proven that he indeed has the skills to succeed. The retail operation includes a main food court where Huntsville staff operate a barbecue station selling meats that are smoked daily, an action station, sub and wrap station, entrée area and grill station. In addition, Huntsville rents out space to two local restaurants: Sakura’s, which serves sushi and Asian food items, and Mama’s, an Italian concept with pizza, pasta, specialty salads and hot sub sandwiches. 

Junearick has reduced his operating costs by nearly $2 million in two years, mostly by streamlining inventory and reducing back-of-house waste. He engineered the foodservice portion of the construction of a new women’s and children’s hospital that included room service. He has built up the retail side of the house by such means as producing grab-and-go items for the entire 10-hospital system, operating five coffee kiosks/c-stores and, most recently, creating a delivery program.

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Those are just the operational successes, the things Junearick will tell you about. He is a humble man, and it must be left to others to talk about how he has transformed himself. 

“Did you know he has developed his own spice line?” asks Char Norton, a former hospital foodservice director turned consultant. “He has gone to Toastmasters because he felt he didn’t speak well and wanted to be a better presenter. He also became a certified dietary manager (CDM) because he knew he couldn’t be an R.D. and wanted to understand the nutrition side of the business.”

Southern born and bred

Junearick, who grew up in Mississippi and Arkansas, says he got his love of food from his grandmother, even though she died when he was young. 

“She had her own garden, and I remember her in that garden and the meals she would put together; very creative,” he recalls. “That’s where the love of cooking was implanted in my soul.”

Junearick was unsure of what he wanted to do with his life. Though he had college scholarship offers, he decided to forgo school and join the Army. But that didn’t mean he had a fighting spirit.

“I wanted an easy job,” he admits. “I wanted to be indoors and I wanted to be around people, so I transferred to foodservice. I had a chance to be creative and I got to see how food was produced in mass amounts. It was exciting.”

Since leaving the Army, with the exception of a short stint running his own restaurant in 2008, Junearick has worked exclusively in the non-commercial marketplace. His employers have included an assisted living facility and airline feeder, but his longest tenure was the eight-plus years he spent with Morrison. Ironically, he probably would not have returned for a second stint at Huntsville had the hospital remained contracted. He had been forced to leave the hospital in 2007 when it changed contractors and for a time worked for Morrison at an account in Birmingham, Ala., while his family remained back in Huntsville, nearly two hours away.

But according to Norton, the hospital wanted Junearick. Norton was brought in to take the institution self-op.

“One of the first things I heard from administration was that they wanted Cedric back,” Norton explains. “He turned us down at first. I went back and asked him what it would take, and he gave me a number. [The administration] thought it over, and one administrator said, ‘Can he make cornbread?’ I said yes, and so they agreed to hire him.”

Rudy Hornsby, vice president of support services, says it is Junearick’s personality and his ability to get the job done that has made him a hot commodity.

“He knows the business and he has that drive, to do what needs to be done to meet his goals,” Hornsby says. “His staff respects him.”

Junearick loves his team and credits it with the success of the program. But he first had to get the team members to believe in themselves and the program.

“If you want to be successful you have to be able to adapt,” Junearick says. “I knew I was going to have to build a team of managers who understood the direction we needed to go in and to bring morale back to the staff. We had to take multiple personalities and management styles and bring them into one vision to create a team atmosphere and a healthy work environment.”

He led by example, going into the kitchen and demonstrating how to streamline inventory so that food—and money—was not wasted. He showed employees how to be creative with unused products, to take advantage of opportunity buys and to guard against theft. 

“I told them to treat this like it was your business,” he says. “If you do it that way you are going to be successful.”

Not only did Junearick convince employees to take more pride in their jobs, the back-of-house changes were a major contributor to the cost savings the foodservice department has realized.

Changing perception

Junearick also had to change the perception hospital staff had of the foodservice program, an attitude that was manifested in the amount of food he saw being brought in or delivered to the hospital.

“I saw all that food coming in the front door,” he explains. “As the chef here I’m thinking, ‘they are coming into my place, providing a service that I could provide.’ So I decided to figure out, a piece at a time, how I could do this at a competitive price.”

Using the knowledge gained earning his bachelor’s degree in business management from Philander Smith College, in Little Rock, Ark., Junearick worked out the logistics of a delivery program that could match street prices while providing one notable cost savings to customers: no delivery charge and a no tipping policy. The program brings in at least $100 a day. (Read more about the delivery program here.)

Junearick suggests that his ability to succeed at Huntsville is due to a combination of factors. “My time in the military instilled the character of who I am today,” he says. “The restaurant business taught me to be really creative and think outside the box. And I also had faith that I could do anything that I set my mind to. I thought that the financial piece was going to be the most challenging, but I learned that I knew more than I thought I did.”

Junearick acknowledges that there have been some growing pains, particularly as he began to change the mindset of foodservice workers. 

“Not everyone is going to like every decision you make, but if it is for the good of the services we provide for our patient customers and family members, then it is the right decision,” he says.