Vinnie Livoti: More than meals

At a Glance

Accomplishments

In 2002, Vinnie Livoti traded in the late nights of his nearly 15 years in the kitchens of commercial restaurants to serve as director of food services for BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina (BCBSSC). Livoti was tasked with overseeing all corporate foodservice locations, including the company’s  seven full-service employee cafés in four cities, vending programs nationwide, catering services  and the corporate dining facility in Columbia.

His job wasn’t an easy one, complicated by multiple vendor contracts, menus and systems in place across the department. “Nothing was consistent throughout the units,” he recalls. “One of my first goals was to streamline that, to get it to one vendor for the contracted locations.”

Streamlining for success

“We had some self-op operations and we had three different foodservice vendors helping us at the time,” explains Danny Grunsky, vice president of general services at BCBSSC, to whom Livoti reports. “And [Vinnie] consolidated our process into where we have only one self-op now. We have one vendor that’s providing all other locations.”

With the exception of executive dining at the Columbia headquarters, which Livoti manages directly as a self-op unit, today all BCBSSC dining units are managed by Southern Foodservice Management. Livoti is the liaison between the contractor and BlueCross.

“Each building is a little different,” Livoti explains. “We basically do the same menus and the same cycles, but each may do something a little different specific to the building because that’s what their folks like there. But it’s consistent as far as pricing and healthy options.”

Livoti also administers the BCBSSC vending program in multiple cities, including Columbia, S.C., Des Moines, Iowa, and Nashville, Tenn.

Mike Barclay, president of Southern Foodservice Management, has found that Livoti’s commercial experience has helped him to manage the dynamic operation. “He brings some skills and experience that equip him to oversee and maintain the program really in a strong and full manner. [And] he not only is client liaison, but he is also overseeing directly one of their internally operated dining programs there,” Barclay adds. “That’s pretty unusual. You’ll very, very seldom see a client liaison who actually [provides] direct oversight of an operation. And by direct oversight, I mean you can go through there and you might look across at the grill and he’ll be there doing it.”

Streamlining operations at BCBSSC has had more benefits than just consistency. Today, participation across meals is, on average, more than 70%, according to Livoti, and the operation has expanded. “When Vinnie came to work here,” Grunsky recalls, “we were serving about 3,500 customers a day consistently, on average. Today, we’re doing about 5,100. We had five facilities when [Vinnie] came, and now we have nine.”

Bringing health to life

In addition to streamlining operations at the various cafés, Livoti has also worked to implement and brand healthy dining options across the units, while continuing to offer a range of items to satisfy the multitude of guests the company serves each day.

“Our goal is, No. 1, to keep employees on site. That’s why we have onsite dining,” Livoti says. “We want to give an option of healthy items for those who are looking for that.”

Working with the BlueCross wellness team and Southern Foodservice Management, Livoti has established CHEF (Corporate Healthy Eating Focus). Offered alongside the mix of items available in all of the cafés and vending areas, customers know that items carrying the CHEF logo are lower in sodium, saturated fats and added sugars, with entrées containing no more than 500 calories, and soups, sides and snacks having no more than 250 calories per serving.

Next to CHEF branded items guests will find My Cousin Vinnie grab-and-go items, another self-branded program Livoti created. A play off of the popular 1992 movie of the same name and labeled with a caricature of Livoti himself, My Cousin Vinnie items include comfort food favorites, sandwiches and salads. The line began within the company’s Columbia headquarters, where Livoti and the BlueCross team chose to offer their own brand of grab-and-go items to enhance the offering at their Blues Coffee Café. “We gave [the space] a bit more upscale/gourmet [look],” Livoti says. “So we came up with the My Cousin Vinnie [items that we] produce in our production facility at one of the Columbia BlueCross locations.”

Livoti has brought the My Cousin Vinnie brand to life through rotating monthly culinary demonstrations at each of the BlueCross locations in South Carolina. Showcased recipes feature comfort food favorites, like shrimp and grits and fresh-rolled sushi. The demonstrations also allow Livoti to get face-to-face time with café guests and keep in touch with contracted staff at each of the locations. “It’s a great opportunity for me to get in front of my customers,” Livoti says. “When I’m doing [the demos], I get a lot of, ‘Oh, you’re Vinnie, you’re the guy!’ It’s a great opportunity to talk to [the guests], get to know them, do they enjoy it, get their feedback.” 

In addition to taking My Cousin Vinnie on the road, Livoti has developed a series of videos in collaboration with the BlueCross wellness team.

“He’s been a tremendous help with educating the employees about healthy food preparation,” explains Elizabeth Campbell, BCBSSC wellness and fitness supervisor. “We have some pretty major wellness initiatives throughout the year and we’ve used him as the nutrition educator, basically, because people just love listening to what he has to say, he’s entertaining, he’s fun to be around.”

So far the team has produced eight videos focused on nutrition and healthy cooking, with topics including Preparing Fruits and Vegetables as a Snack and Building A Healthy Meal: From Pantry to Plate, often demonstrating recipe prep for one of the popular CHEF items. It’s not “run-of-the-mill nutrition education, eat your fruits and vegetables type of talk,” Campbell explains. “He finds a way to make it a lot more interesting to listen to.” The videos are available on the company’s intranet and have been viewed more than 20,000 times.

“We’re just trying to promote onsite dining in general,” Livoti says. “Just because this is a captive audience, we still need to go out there and earn our customers’ business every day—through customer service, through menu options, value meals … Every day it’s ‘how do we win our customer again?’ That’s how we try to approach it.”

Hospitality and beyond

A new charge for Livoti is coordinating and conducting cooking classes at three South Carolina BLUE retail locations across the state. Opened in 2013, the stores sell insurance and provide customer service but also serve as a resource for the surrounding community. With classroom space and cooking facilities, free healthy cooking classes are offered at the stores, “and Vinnie is the one who is the go-to guy to find chefs to do the presentations,” explains Elizabeth Hammond, media relations director for BCBSSC. “[It’s] one of the many ways he reaches outside of the company.”

And Livoti is well versed in reaching beyond the walls of BlueCross. In 2005 after Hurricane Katrina, the company sheltered 150 New Orleans residents displaced by the storm at a vacant hotel near the Columbia headquarters for a number of months.

“Vinnie took on providing foodservice for those folks,” Grunsky says. With the help of  employee volunteers, “he was serving breakfast, lunch and dinner at [the hotel] location in addition to running our shop.” A BlueCross site coordinator for the storm shelter maintains contact with some of the evacuees, Grunsky explains, and “It’s amazing how many of them still recall and mention Vinnie and his crew and the support he gave to them, and the meals and the time spent and all of that effort, even to this day.“

In addition to actively participating in foodservice industry organizations, including the American Culinary Federation and local charities such as Palmetto Place Children’s Emergency Shelter, Livoti is often called upon by BlueCross or the community to share his skills.

“Every time there is one of those kinds of fundraisers or functions, you’ve got to have food, and so they call on Vinnie and he steps up to the plate,” Grunsky says. “Anytime they get into the charitable mix, Vinnie gets right in there as one of the guest chefs or [seeks] support from all the people we do business with. He is a tremendous asset to the community both through BlueCross as well as on his own.”