The Office

We spent this week working mostly in the office on our Freshmen College Banquet menu and on our chemical inventory project.

The banquet menu is looking really good. We've got all the recipes approved and figured out how many portions of each thing we're serving. We also spent most of Friday working on writing out the recipes so that they can be put into FoodPro.

The chemical inventory project is also running really smoothly now. We got all the inventories done and turned in. This week we got to meet with representatives from Ecolab to see about using only Ecolab chemicals in UGA foodservices. They were really great to talk to and had a lot of ideas of what products we should be using. The best part is they're drawing up a bid for us, so we don't have to go crazy trying to put one together ourselves. We've got another meeting set up with them to go over the bid.

This week was very eventful.....

On Monday we got to go out towards Atlanta to Sutherlands and Southeast. I really enjoyed both of these places because you really got to see what goes into the process of getting food. Its not as simple as most people would think there is not just two parties involved. One product may make its way through 3-4 different homes before you eat it. It was interesting to see at Sutherlands how a family run company works. Almost every family member they have works at their shop. It really shows that there is a lot of love and devotion in the company. I would choose to do business with them if i were to buy wholesale. Southeast was similar but instead of a warehouse it was where they make produce. We got to see women hand picking at spinach and i never realized that a lot of the lettuce we eat is hand picked and not necessarily all done by machines.

Menu planning was really enjoyable for me. We spent a whole day looking through cookbooks and magazines picking "Ivy winners" and adding them to our final menu. I think we picked a good variety of foods that will be appealing to almost anyone who is coming to the dinner. We could only pick one dish from each place that won so even if we saw a lot of recipes in one book we could only use one. I think that is good because it gives a variety of interest.

I spent time shadowing on Wednesday and learned how to close. I followed Kirti around and she told me that she normally works the night shift which is from 11pm until 6am. I can not imagine working on the opposite schedule of most people. I give her credit for doing that everyday.

We have finally started our chemical project. Thursday was mainly spent going around to all the locations and taking inventory of what they have based off of the inventory taken in December. Each location uses many different products which makes the inventory and project very difficult. Friday we started our Chemical project where we are trying to minimize the amount of chemicals they use in UGA food service. On Friday we also went to "Your Pie". Your Pie is a subway like pizza shop that was started by an man who use to be a red shirt at O-House. He left over a year ago to start his own restaurant called Your Pie with a concept like subway where you go down the line and get anything on your pizza that you'd like. He let us try the pizza and i have to say it was some of the best pizza i have ever had. I would like to be an entrepreneur one day so it was really interesting to be able to talk to a man who was under 30 who has his own business. He had just sold a Franchise in Charleston and had one other location in Athens. It was motivating to know that in a down economy he has done that much in just one short year.

We had a great weekend and will be well rested for the next week.