Busy Little Bees

• This week was really busy and lots of fun. I have a feeling this blog is going to be really long too becuase of it, but there's so much to talk about...

• We started off going on a field trip to Sutherland's outside of Atlanta. For anyone who doesn't know, Sutherland's is a family held produce wholesale company. We got the grand tour around their warehouses at the Georgia Farmer's Market. The place is huge and they just keep adding on as they expand.

• Sutherland's was also nice enough to arrange for us to get a tour of Southeast Distributing's produce plant on the Georgia Farmer's Market grounds. The produce plant preps the various types of produce for clients in a variety of ways. They have many machines that can do specialized tasks like washing and shredding lettuce, but they also have people doing prep work by hand. They told us that prepping and packaging the celery that they send out takes 16 hours a day with about 8 workers going non-stop. It was seriously mind-boggling. Not to mention that those workers are in a building that rangest from about 35-42 degrees depending on the room they're in. It is not a job that I would ever want to have. The plant also uses an insane amount of water each month for their machines- somewhere in the vicinity of $22,000 a month. Overall it was a really interesting trip of something that we hadn't seen before.

• So that was our Monday adventure. Tuesday we got to do something completely different- we worked with Pat (the foodservice dietary specialist). Pat basically gave us free reign to plan the menu for the Five Star Dinner that they have every year. UGA won an Ivy Award several years ago and does a dinner each year featuring recipes from other Ivy winners or their chefs. Ivy Awards (for anyone who is as clueless as I was) are an annual award for foodservice operations that have the highest standards of excellence in food, service and overall hospitality. There's only a few winners each year so it's a really big deal.

• Planning the menu itself wasn't that difficult. Pat has basically been collecting all the magazines that she subscribes to (there's like 12 of them) for the last year. Then someone (us) has to go through them all and look for any recipes from Ivy winners or their chefs. We got through a lot of the magazines before abandoning the effort and just using what we had found to make the menu. I'm just upset that we're not going to be here for the dinner because the menu sounds really good.

• Wednesday I spent the day with Wayne Dahl and the catering staff. They just moved their offices into the new Tate II building. I got a complete tour around Tate II (their new headquarters). Then I got to help setup for the freshman dinner that they cater in the BullDog Cafe. It went off smoothly with the exception of the fire alarm going off right before the event and messing up everyone. Catering is definitely a different style of foodservice than the dinning halls. Everything is rushed and crazy for short periods of time and then goes slowly and relaxed between events. I can see why many people can't handle that type of work environment.

• For the last part of the week we got started on one of our projects: the chemical inventory. the whole goal is to figure out what is being used and then streamlining the list down to a standardized list of what is allowed to be used. We're also supposed to make the entire lsit as green as possible. After working on it for two days I can see why everyone says that it needed to be done, but nobody ever tried to do it.

• Foodservices uses an insane number of chemcials throughout the campus and half of them are duplicates. I've noticed that a lot of people either don't know what the chemical is used for or don't use it for the intended purpose. And a label that says "degreaser" can really mean almost anything to the employees using them. Making the actual inventory lists wasn't that difficult to do- it just involved getting slightly dirty tracking everything down in each storeroom. And then playing detective to find all the other places that things ended up getting stored. The hard part is turning out to be finding out what the uses of the chemicals are and how they are actually used. Making recommendations on what should be kept on the list and what shouldn't is going to be harder than I originally thought.
  
• We also took another field trip on Friday to a local restaurant Your Pie. It's owned by an old assistant manager from UGA. I have to say that it is a really unique idea to making pizza. He set the place up around a line assembly for personal thin crust pizza that is baked in a stone oven. It is delicious. Anyone who is in Athens and hasn't tried it should definitely go. Drew (the owner) is starting to franchise out now and he's in the process of opening a second store in Five Points here in Athens. Personally I think he should try to sell a franchise to someone in Gainesville.

• Our week closed off with us starting the plan for the Freshman College closing banquet that is one of our other projects. Janet (the woman who plans the opening banquet) met with us and so did Bryan (the event's chef). We chose Greek as our theme and are starting to find some interesting recipes for the menu. Janet was really a wealth of knowledge on the entire process. I personally had forgotten about needing flowers and menu cards for each person. There's a lot of little details that goes into planning and executing an event for 400 people. But I think we're up to the task.