Steve Mangan: Sharpening the culinary focus

At a Glance

Accomplishments

Steve Mangan has enhanced the foodservice department at Northwestern University by:

Aworld-class university deserves a world-class dining program. That’s the job for which Steve Mangan was hired. In his nearly four years at the helm at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill., Mangan, general manager for Sodexo, has led the dining services team in redeveloping the program, from the food to the opportunities provided beyond the plate.

For Mangan, to be a part of this nationally recognized institution (Northwestern is No. 12 in US News & World Report’s National University Rankings), it was essential that the dining program operate with the same standards of quality and align with the university’s mission and values. He has achieved that by filtering department activity through a culinary lens.

Related:Confessions of Steve Mangan

“Chefs innovate change, they want new things and they want to do different things all the time,” he explains. “Northwestern University has a global reach, we’ve got people from all over the world here. Our cooks are from all over as well, so we can match this interest in global experiences with our team and integrate it very easily.”

Julie Payne-Kirchmeier, assistant vice president of student auxiliary services, praises Mangan’s approach. “Steve has an energy level that I think is infectious. Bringing his chef’s perspective along with his manager’s perspective I think has allowed him to … align the mission and the goals and the strategy of Sodexo with that of Northwestern. All [of the program elements are] coming full circle, so it’s great that they’re a fully integrated partner, not just someone we hired to run the food program.”

Mangan credits obtaining student feedback as another element of the department’s success. “We have to engage with our customers on a regular basis, whether it’s a one-on-one interaction in a dining hall or in the line at Starbucks, to having food committees in each of the [residence] halls that the chefs run, [to] our dietitian interacting with students all the time [so that] we have a good understanding of special needs.”

Creating a vision

“With any transformation, whether it be in foodservice or whether it be in business, there needs to be a vision,” shares Joe Burdi, executive chef and operations manager for Sodexo at Northwestern. “So in order for changes to happen, everyone needs to understand what direction we’re really shooting for. That’s what Steve put out here for us.”

Mangan’s vision included strategic reorganization of the foodservice department so that chef managers operate as leaders. “The big change that we did a couple of years ago was to flip the organizational chart where we’ve got a culinarian as the lead in each of [the six] dining halls, then the foodservice manager is secondary and reports to the chef, versus the other way around,” Mangan explains.

“Having the culinary leadership in there, it drives all of the other strategic things we’re trying to do,” he adds. “It helps with nutrition [and] it helps with communicating out all the information we have now on allergens and special needs diets.”

Culinary leadership also helps with sustainability. “Chefs get the whole seasonal, local, fresh, great-food concept; it’s not something you have to convince anybody to do. Chefs are concerned with minimizing waste, maximizing the potential of our employees, having a safe work environment. All these things come easily through a culinary focus.”

This core competency has shaped the complete flavor and nutrition experience the dining program provides, better serving the international student and faculty population.

Residential dining hall menus have been updated to include a broad selection of foods, such as a complete vegetarian and vegan program—“not just beans and greens,” Mangan says—kosher items prepared in a fully supervised kosher kitchen and halal dishes for Muslim students. And a variety of gluten-free and allergen-sensitive items are more easily identifiable through improved labeling.

A larger percentage of fresh, organic, local and sustainable foods are also being purchased. By making sustainable initiatives a priority, Northwestern has “pushed our local and sustainable spend, including cage-free, sustainable proteins, organics, etc., into the 15 percent to 20 percent range in Chicago, even with the challenges we have with geography and calendar,” Mangan shares. 

Serving students

“Our students have very sophisticated palates and they expect that in their food,” Payne-Kirchmeier says. “Having Steve and his focus on culinary has …  created this evolution in our food program that we’ve really needed to have for a long time.

“That transformation in residential dining from traditional protein, vegetable, salad and pasta to ‘let’s challenge the students’ palates, let’s really work with the different residence hall advisory boards to make this something that the students call their own,’ I think that’s been helpful, and the students are starting to see that there’s more value in their dining program and they’re using it like crazy,” she adds.

Retail and catering operations have also received Mangan’s attention. Successful national retail brands have been added to the portfolio, including Frontera Fresco, a Mexican concept developed by Chicago chef and restaurateur Rick Bayless, and university-branded options have been revamped. And now, Payne-Kirchmeier explains “the catering business is going up, which is fantastic because that means there’s value.”

Shaping the future

Mangan has applied the same discipline to developing his team. “You learn quite early that you’ve got to have a team behind you. If you want to get home at night, you have to have your people knowing what you want and what you expect. And when you’re gone, they’re going to deliver the product and the service the way you’d expect it if you were there,” he explains.

One of Mangan’s goals is ensuring his culinary team has opportunities for professional growth.

For example, by fulfilling the requirements in order for the Northwestern kitchens to serve as ACF certification sites, Mangan has provided a way for staff chefs to advance their careers without looking beyond their workplace.

Mangan regularly invites certified culinary educators to the kitchens to work with staff chefs in preparation for certifications and competitions.

This mentorship and collaboration has afforded Chris Studtmann, executive chef and operations manager for Sodexo at Northwestern, the opportunity to earn his Certified Executive Chef (CEC) certificate and pursue obtaining Certified Chef Educator (CCE) credentials.

“[Steve] actually brought people in to help us refocus our skills a little bit and [ask] ‘what can I learn’—so not just the idea of [saying] people are going to help you learn, but we actually sat down and did it,” Studtmann says.

Mangan has also paved the way for culinarians at the start of their careers. “One of the things that we have accomplished is reaching out to some of the local culinary programs in Chicago and recruiting talent,” he says about the department’s Manager-In-Training (MIT) program. During the course of nine months, MIT candidates are exposed to all elements of the program, including food and labor management and purchasing, in preparation for management roles at Northwestern or Sodexo. “We’re trying to intentionally develop our people for promotion,” Mangan explains. 

The program provides dining services with “an entry-level bench, so to speak, where we get to find motivated culinarians, they learn our systems, we can see who they are and what they are, and if we find a place for them as we have people moving up, we can feed them into the entry-level management jobs we have,” Mangan shares. “We’ve already placed four or five of those students this last year.”

Mangan isn’t limiting his culinary makeover to campus. In an effort to make Northwestern a part of and resource for Chicago’s food scene, Mangan and his culinary team participate in off-campus cooking classes for students and community members, hunger relief programs, nutrition outreach, partnerships with local restaurants and farmers’ market initiatives.