Short week

This week was a short week for us.

It is days before the fourth of July so we have a shorter week. Our week started Monday when we did orientation. Orientation is where the freshman come in and learn all there is to know about UGA and how to adapt to college life. We followed the orientation team on there long 7am-7pm day. We begun the day welcoming the freshman to UGA and helping sell coffee and donuts to the parents, after that we all went over to O-House to assemble pamphlets for the parents and students. We all divided up after that half of us going to snelling and half going to summit. At each location we welcomed the parents or students and gave them the daily menu.

The main goal of the orientation team is to inform students and parents about the meal plan and to get them to sign up for it as soon as possible. At UGA the meal plan is not required, students have a choice whether they will buy the 5 day unlimited access or the 7 day unlimited access. The meal plan in my opinion is a no brain er. I had a meal plan my freshman and sophomore year and it made my life, living on campus, so much easier. I think that for anyone with out a kitchen it is the most economical way to eat, people end up thinking its much More expensive because they are paying for all the food at once.

On Tuesday we did more orientation it is a two day event for the incoming freshmen so we followed the team around again on Tuesday.

Wednesday we did more orientation and worked on our projects. Unfortunately Mr. Floyd was sick this day, we were scheduled to shadow him.

We have a long weekend ahead of us!!!! I hope to find lots to do around town and enjoy America's Birthday!

Orientation Week

This week was spent with the orientation team for foodservice. Orientation at UGA is a 2 day process. The foodservice orientation people basically focus on selling meal plans. They also sell refreshments in the morning, greet people coming to eat at the different dining halls, and talk about student employment opportunities. But the main thing is to sell the meal plan.

Day 1 of student orientation starts off with registration. I spent a lot of time directing people here or there and giving directions to Tate Center. The refreshment stand also had to be set up and manned. Then we spent some time assembling information brochures for the parents and students that get handed out. Around lunch we all went to the dining halls where the parents or students were directed to eat and played greeter. In the afternoon we handed out the brochures while the parents were inundated with information about various important things on campus. Then we moved across the street and did the same for the students. Day 1 concludes with the student tailgate dinner where we basically directed people towards the food. All in all it's a 12 hour day.

Day 2 was much shorter, only a 7 hour day because the students have most of the afternoon to explore and do thing independently. We played greeter and checked meal tickets for breakfast. The major event of day 2 is the resource fair. Foodservices sets up 2 booths in the fair and spends a few hours asking everyone they see if they have bought the meal plan yet and if they are interested in working for foodservices. It's chaotic and fun since you get to talk to a lot of people. After cleaning up from that we got to go back to the dining halls and collect meal tickets again for the lunch crowd. Compared to day 1 it was a walk in the park just because it was so much shorter.

The best part of working with the orientation team was our transportation. They have this van that doesn't have any seats in it. So whenever we have to change locations everyone piles in and tries to balance on milk crates. Definitely the highlight of the day for them.

We also got all of the recipes for the Freshmen College closing banquet into FoodPro. Everything is batched out for the actual event. So now we can focus on the flower arrangements, the menu design, and tracking down enough soup bowls for everyone. Hopefully we'll get to all of that next week.

Office week

This week Kris was gone so we had a lot of office time. We worked out of her office a lot and in the dining room where we could find Internet. Our goal for the week was to make progress on two of our projects. We worked on the chemical project the majority of Monday and Tuesday morning. Tuesday we met with two representatives from Ecolab. We told them that we wanted to go to all Ecolab products. We plan to meet with them again after the 4th of July break.

We also worked on the Freshmen College Closing Banquet. We are making a lot of progress, however, we still have things to finish before the banquet. I am really enjoying working on this project it is interesting and I am learning a lot about planning an event.

This week was fun and I am glad that we had time to work on our projects. I can not believe our time here is basically half over. It has gone by very fast.

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.

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.

Getting use to the South

Hey!!

Week One is under our belts, I am starting to feel more at home here in Georgia. However the heat and humidity will take a long time to get use to.

This week started with a lot of early mornings. We spent time this week working at Bolton, Snelling, and The Summit. Both Katie and I got to work at stations this week. It was a nice change of pace. We were lucky enough to work with full timers who really know what they are doing and are pleased to teach you. Monday we spent time in Bolton’s dish room. Surprisingly dish room is much harder than I thought it would be but after the first 400 Football players we got the hang of it.

Tuesday I worked on salad prep where I worked in prepping all the items that you see on Bolton’s lovely new salad Bar. There is a lot that goes into getting the salad bar ready everyday in the transition from Breakfast to Lunch/Dinner.

On Wednesday we got to interview the upper management team, and all who helps UGA foodservice run smoothly. We interviewed everyone from Dietary Specialists, To "Dan the Meal Plan Man". We also had the pleasure of interviewing accountants, IT managers, Human Resource managers, Material Manger, FoodPro guru, and even Mr. Floyd himself. It was very interesting for me (a Management major) to hear what all the different positions have to say about their jobs. It was insightful and helpful.

Thursday I shadowed Henry, he is one of the assistant cafeteria managers at Bolton. It was a hectic day from all the camps. I arrived at work at 6am to help Henry with his morning duties. We did payroll and Scheduling. The remainder of the day we made sure everything ran smoothly and made sure all the employees knew what they needed to accomplish for the day.

When Friday rolled around I was getting tired, but didn’t let it show! I was at Snelling on Friday. I spent the morning shadowing Diane. She is one of the Managers at Snelling dining hall. She spends her Friday mornings doing overtime reports. This week there were almost 15 people who had overtime. We had to justify why each person got overtime for that week and give reasons on a paper to turn into accounting. After helping her I shadowed Student Management the rest of the day. I followed around two different Black Shirts; Black Shirts are the names for the Student management team, which includes student managers and student supervisors.

I enjoyed this week I really learned about what the management does on a daily basis. It will help when I graduate and become a manger myself. Everyone has a different management style that works for them and I have been able to see what they do and how they make it work for them and their staff.