Eureka Moments

Keith DeMars, director of nutrition and dining services at 396-bed St. Mary’s Hospital in Richmond, Va., says two childhood events pushed him to a career in commercial foodservice. His wife’s death, however, steered him toward healthcare foodservice.

“There were two moments in my childhood that decided foodservice was for me. At the age of six, the town that I grew up in, Saranac Lake, N.Y., was a spot the Army would go through on its way to Fort Drum. During that convoy there was a day when the Army personnel were out on the roads and it was pouring rain. I noticed that they had lunches in paper bags and they were soaked. I asked my mother if we could make sandwiches, and we handed out boxed lunches. That was my first catering job.

The second time was when I was 11. There are a lot of ponds and lakes in upstate New York, and we would go camping in the summer. There was a woman that would make silver dollar pancakes and German potato breakfast salad every Sunday morning. She would ring a bell and if you were in earshot, you were welcomed to this island where she had breakfast. I remember how I thought that was cool how she brought all these people together.

In 1982 I was finishing my associate’s degree at the CIA, and the Department of Justice came and recruited chefs for the federal prison system. I had worked on the commercial side. We were in a recession and I was going to get married and start a family. We felt it was a good idea to find something stable.

When I left prison foodservice, I did not want to go back into restaurant /hotels. I figured the other end of the spectrum was healthcare. My wife had passed away and she had spent a lot of time in hospitals. It appeared to me that there was a real opportunity in the acute-care setting for someone like myself. It was disheartening to see what was going on in the hospitals with food. After my wife passed away, I made it my life’s mission to get a job in hospitals and see what little change I could do.”