Father Knows Best

Randy Sparrow, director of food, nutrition and environmental services at 355-bed Bloomington Hospital in Indiana, heeded his father’s advice to choose a career that he was passionate about. Sparrow first fell for foodservice in high school when he started a concession business for an agriculture club project.

“When you were in FFA (previously Future Farmers of America), every student had a project. My father was the FFA advisor. At that time any teacher, including my father, could go to the Army Surplus store to get equipment. One trip he saw that they had an institutional-size ice cream maker. He bought it and this became my FFA project. We dealt with a local dairy company to get the mix. We started out with vanilla and then expanded to eight flavors. We sold ice cream at town carnivals. I enjoyed that so much and it became so successful that the next year FFA decided to expand, so we added soft serve.

I had a tractor and FFA wanted it so I sold them my tractor for the ice cream equipment. During college, I started my own business with that. I kept doing the hard ice cream and I also got into other concessions like pig ears, which are fried bread dough. I would have

up to three stands at one carnival. I also bought a caramel corn business, which I just closed a few years ago.

It’s always good to have someone to encourage you, and that was my father. He was a ‘sky’s the limit’ guy. By the time I got through college, we really just stuck to the popcorn and did the ice cream on the side. There were more health regulations with the ice cream than the caramel corn. For every carnival you have to go through county inspections, and the popcorn was made and pre-packaged before we got to the carnivals. So the popcorn was inspected once and then it didn’t need to be inspected at each carnival.

I would say these experiences helped me decide I wanted to go into foodservice. My dad’s philosophy was to decide on a major you could enjoy the rest of your life. You have to have a passion. I’ll be honest, I love to eat.”