Mark This! Podcast, Episode 12, Allergen Solutions
Host: Heather Dotchel, Corporate Communications
Guests: Brandon Mathias, Food Safety and Allergen Program Manager; Gillian Kelly, Health and Wellness Manager for James Madison University Dining Services
It is time to "Mark This!", a podcast in which we peel back the corporate curtain to reveal the cool and innovative people, programs and projects that are happening all over Aramark's varied lines of business.
I'm Heather Dotchel. As a member of Aramark's Communications team, I see and hear amazing things that are happening across our company every day. These remarkable initiatives happen because we have remarkable people behind them, building opportunity, building innovation, and building community.
Let's talk allergen solutions. This ever-growing need is a key focus for Aramark's lines of business as we serve our communities daily. Because we prioritize safety, we continue to develop and deploy new ways to strengthen allergen awareness and management in our kitchens. Our approach is designed to give our people the information and tools they need to deliver safe food, while also affirming that our allergen solution stations meet the highest industry standards.
To walk us through our corporate allergen solution development and add account specific detail, are Brandon Mathias, food safety and allergen program manager for Aramark, and Gillian Kelly, health and wellness manager for James Madison University Dining Services. Thanks to both of you for joining us today. Brandon, please let our audience know a little bit about you, as well as how you ended up specializing in allergens on the safety team.
Sure. Thanks, Heather. And thanks for having me on, by the way. I am super stoked to be on. The second that the first one dropped, I was just waiting for my turn, so I am genuinely excited to be on today.
Thanks. So yeah, I'm Aramark's food safety and allergen program manager on the Safety and Resolutions team. And to put it in terms for the lay person, I oversee and manage all our tools, trainings, and resources for food safety to make sure that they're current, effective, and meet the needs of our operators wherever they work. In addition to this, I also help drive improvement on development of Aramark's Food Allergen Management program.
Moving on to the second part of the question, I'm going to wax poetic a little bit. There is a passage in Hemingway's novel, The Sun Also Rises, and a character named Mike is asked how he went bankrupt. "Two ways," he answers. "Gradually, then suddenly." This is just as applicable to how I started specializing in food allergens, just minus the bankrupt bit.
So I've spent a lot of time the last few years thinking through whether there was one catalyst behind my interest in this topic, and I don't think it was one experience per se. I think I saw firsthand how difficult and disruptive it was for food allergic students to safely navigate the college experience, and I started in-unit within collegiate hospitality. I would often take notes on things that I wanted to work on and improve while I was there. And after about a year and a half of working in the field, I transitioned into a role at headquarters on the food safety team and gradually then suddenly began working on tools and trainings and grew into my current role helping improve how we accommodate food allergic customers.
It's a very literary way to start our day and I appreciate that. Gillian, you are a dietician and currently manage allergen solutions for dining at JMU. What do you most enjoy about your work?
Yeah, well thanks for having me on too, first and foremost. I don't know that I have any fun classic literature tie-ins into my answer, but I really enjoy that my job is kind of like a puzzle and I think that it's a really cool puzzle to be a part of and it's always just growing. There's always new solves to find new pieces of this puzzle that come about, and I really just love how interconnected every aspect of my job is, whether it be learning more about our production end of things, helping with our menus, dealing with our students, and then on the other turnaround there, taking that information from students, the questions they ask, the concerns that they have, the perspectives that they bring up around how we produce something or how our menu is set up, allows me to really take that back to our operations team to figure out, again, this is kind of our student perspective on this. How can we work with this new problem or this new comment to make ourselves better?
So I really like that aspect that everything that I do ties into each other and really kind of brings it full circle, which I think is not always something you can get out of a job and something really unique about this one.
All right. Well, let's dive into some specific questions here. Brandon, what is Aramark's guiding philosophy to safety, and specifically allergens?
Our philosophy is to create and foster a workplace where we reach target zero, no harm to people or the environment. I heard a colleague the other day say something that really resonated with me. To paraphrase him, he said, much of the dismay of everyone on the call, and at least initially, safety isn't a priority, it's a value. Priorities change, but values don't. Ensuring the safety of our clients, employees and customers, it's not just a priority at Aramark. It is a commitment. It is a value of ours. Food allergies are not something that people choose and are not just a safety issue. Any request someone makes with a food allergy, it is an ask for help, not only for their safety but for their inclusion. And Aramark's commitment is to do everything that we can to enable and engage all our employees to ensure our guests can bring their whole selves to every dining experience and go home the same way they came in.
I don't know about you, but this to me is kind of the essence of hospitality. People can forget interactions, or people are inherently forgetful. We forget names, we forget interactions, we forget where we ate, but the thing that always sticks with me is how I feel after a dining experience. And I think for folks that are able to go home safe and be able to bring their whole true, authentic selves to every dining experience that they have with us, it's pretty cool to be a part of that. So yeah.
Thanks. I love that. Can you let us know what the suite of solutions are across the company?
In terms of solutions, we have Allergen Solutions, which was previously mentioned. It is a standalone station in a larger food service operation that provides foods to food allergic customers that are made without the top nine allergens. These include egg, milk, wheat, sesame, tree nuts, soy, fish and shellfish. And Allergen Solutions, they go under one of three names; either True Balance, Clean Plate, or All Good, depending on the line of business and concept that you're operating within. In addition to that, we have AllerTrain, which is available to any and every Aramark employee free of charge.
This training, it is available on our internal LMS My Work Life, and it is as simple as just logging into My Work Life and searching for the course and enrolling and there's no charges at all. Headquarters covers the cost. And to date, we've had over 6,100 employees trained since it has deployed two years ago, which it's one of those kind of pinch me things. I can't believe that this has happened and I just want to give props to Gillian for being ahead of the curve and beating us to the punch and having all her folks on AllerTrain before us. So we're just really following suit after JMU. So yeah, there's that.
Gillian, that's actually a great transition point because what do these efforts look like on JMU's campus? How do they translate to a specific school in the collegiate hospitality line of business?
Yeah, thanks for pointing that out, Brandon. We're definitely trailblazers here at JMU. Everybody should know we were first with the allergen training, so that's a big way how those translations make it to JMU. We've been using AllerTrain at our campus for probably four and a half years. We've been using it as long as I've been here, which is over three and a half years and probably for about a year before that as well. So that's been really remarkable for us to integrate into our day-to-day expectations for all of our managers as well as our staff as we're getting them onboarded, and I think it really sets the tone for what our staff can expect in terms of our values here, making sure that we let them know this is a priority, this is a value that we're going to integrate into your day-to-day as an employee.
So I think that's a really great thing that we've been able to do here as far as training. And in terms of the allergen solutions, we are fortunate enough to have three different versions of True Balance on our campus, one in each of our residential dining halls. For those that might be familiar with JMU's campus and for those that aren't, our campus is pretty large. It's separated by a highway down the middle, so we have one dining hall and one side of the highway, one on the other. And it's a luxury to have one True Balance on each side of that highway to make sure we make it as accessible as we can to students living on both sides and going to class on both sides. We've also piloted True Balance Catering, which has been something really fun for us to experiment with here just to offer an additional solution for our clients that might be looking for different options within our catering menu. So that's been really cool for us too.
And beyond that, there's so many different ways to cater to our guests with food allergies beyond just those Aramark allergen solutions. We're fortunate enough to have a worry-free zone that we can help students with kind of our top three, peanut, tree nut, and gluten related dietary restrictions. That is prepackaged items in there for them that really helps to augment their meal plan with some things like dessert that they might be kind of missing out of on our campus.
And a lot of upon request options too, we have students that have a really wide range of what they're comfortable with in terms of their dietary restrictions. So some really do gravitate towards that allergen solution gold standard. Others are interested in a little bit more variety from other stations and going to all the same locations that their friends can with just some added safety measures into an upon request option, whether that be a made without gluten hamburger bun or a slice of vegan cheese or talking to a manager to have their burger prepared off the grill instead of on the grill, whatever it is that they might need to make that a little bit safer. So so many different ways to kind of translate what Aramark's been able to provide to us and make it fit our campus here.
Do you have a student solve that you're particularly proud of that you can share?
Yeah, for me, I think I'm really proud every year at the conclusion of it, of how many students that we have seen, how many students have successfully navigated, and we always get some nice comments, maybe just when we see them in the hallway or in the dining hall or some nice emails over the summer. Definitely really crowd-pleasing for our staff when I get to forward those along to them and let them know we've had some really happy guests at the end of each year and allowed them to eat here successfully. But I think some of the ones that I'm most proud of are some of those more challenging cases.
One in particular, there was a student who really had kind of slipped through the cracks. They unfortunately were not inclined to reach out to us about their dietary restrictions when they got to campus. They tried to navigate on their own, didn't really necessarily have the tools that they needed to do that successfully. And by the time that they did reach out, they were in a bit of a disgruntled state, for lack of a better word there. And it's a lot harder to dig ourselves out of a hole once we're in it than if we got to prevent that to begin with. So that's always a piece of advice that I tell the students that I do get to meet with, that they do continue to reach out if they're struggling and don't just try to do that alone. But once we're already in that state, we really have to do the best that we can to regain that trust after we've already lost it.
So it was a student who was really looking for a meal plan exemption, which is something that obviously we do our best to avoid from the standpoint that we want students to be included here. We want them to be part of our meal plans. So we went through that whole process with them and essentially came to the conclusion that we did have options for them and that they did need to be on this meal plan. So of course they were willing to follow along with what we needed them to do at that time. Once they really started listening to us and working with us and having that open mind and having those sit down conversations with us, the student really did open up and really just saw what we could do for them. This student in particular ended up kind of doing a variety of different offerings that we have, including some chef prepared meals in which our chefs really sit down with them and have conversations and set up a schedule to make sure that we can prepare a meal that meets their needs, as well as foods that they actually enjoy eating.
And that kind of ended up being a really keystone piece of the puzzle for this particular student. And they were so happy by the end of the school year and it was a really big win just to see them smiling, to see them happy that they got to participate in this meal plan, and see our staff interact with this student on the day-to-day.
Well, I'm glad you were able to step in and provide a safe and tasty path to meal success. Brandon, how about you? What have you had your hand in that you're most proud of?
I think that this is a very difficult question for me to answer because there are several things. From the second that food comes in the receiving dock to the second that it's on a tabletop and being eaten, there isn't a moment where food allergens can't become an issue. And we began this journey for food allergen management programmatic improvement a couple of years ago. And one of the key jumping off points that really started so much activity, so many good things that have happened in the last few years, was our strategic partnership that we started with MenuTrinfo. For those who might not know, MenuTrinfo is an accredited training and audit company, and they are sort of the premier subject matter experts on food allergen management in the commercial food service space. And through our partnership, that allowed us to begin hosting their accredited food allergy training, AllerTrain, on our LMS.
And again, 6,100 people have been trained. I still can't get over it, but that training covers a comprehensive range of topics that relate to food allergies in food service. And with that certification, people demonstrate a high level of competency in understanding how serious and potentially life-threatening a food allergy can be and how to prepare allergen and gluten-friendly food. In addition to that, I think I've been really grateful for the last few years working with so many different people on helping improve food allergens across the company, whether it's culinary or marketing or legal or operations. And our registered dietician network, which is very expansive, I've been super appreciative of all of the relationships and all of the work that has occurred in the last few years. So just been really, really grateful for those experiences and everyone's input and feedback, and it's just been kind of surreal and tremendous in helping us improve things across the company.
And then one last thing, a video was shared with me a few weeks ago by one of our regional RDs, and it included an interview with a student and it was incredibly poignant to hear the student talk about how, were it not for Aramark to be able to provide safe dining experiences on a meal-by-meal, day-by-day basis, this student would not be in this highly prestigious institution. I mean, I'm not going to take credit for anything. There's so much that goes into that, but to just be some part of enabling that to happen, it was just so cool. But yeah, I'll stop there.
Great teams do great things. The one last thing I do want to touch on, which you just alluded to, Brandon, is the registered dietician network that we have across lines of businesses across the enterprise here at Aramark. Gillian, you are a dietician. Why is it important that students have access to a campus dietician, either in person or via digital methods? And really, this would be extrapolated to any of the lines of business, but let's talk specifically about your experience. What's the gamut of dietary concerns that you work with daily?
Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, I think just to call out on the fact that dieticians are growing in this industry is just really incredible. Even just in my time with the company, the expansion of how many roles exist for us at different accounts is just tremendous and so exciting for those of us that are dieticians and get to see this growth and the potential growth that it can have in the future. But I think the importance of this truly is that it just shows value that we have towards students with different dietary restrictions. It demonstrates to them, to prospective students, to existing students, that we care enough about their dietary restrictions to have a point person whose priority really is to look at the operation from their perspective. And that is so invaluable to them that they have this point person to contact, that they're going to get some consistent information from this person that specializes in looking at this dining operation with their needs in mind.
It's probably not wrong to say that this population is not the most trusting, and rightfully so. Everything that they do, something as simple as going to a restaurant, can be life or death for some of these individuals. So many of the decisions that they make are based off of word of mouth from trusted individuals within their circles, and their circles are fairly small. It's a very tight-knit community. So I think it's invaluable to have these dieticians so that people can talk and say, "Hey, I had this really great experience when we met at XYZ, the university with this individual who is a dietician that was really helpful and enlightening about the program that they offer there."
And I think just beyond our line of business, food allergies and dietary restrictions are not restricted to college students. So helping people navigate those dietary restrictions in all of our spaces is just so important to provide that customer service element and that inclusion piece that we're trying to provide no matter where we're working, whether it be K through 12 or a hospital or what have you. So truly, I think that dietician piece really does initiate a process for handling something like that, which really does speak volumes to our guests, and allowed them to be included in our day-to-day. Like Brandon's example, that positive feedback is what we wait for in our line of work to know that this student got to come here and got to meet friends and got to live on campus and have all those same experiences to set them up for success in their futures, which is just such a great piece of what we get to do.
In terms of the second piece of that, in terms of how much we deal with and the quantity of it and the gamut in which it spans, we really get to see everything. I think I mentioned earlier top three on our campus are peanut and tree nut allergies, as well as various gluten related dietary restrictions. But truly, that top nine makes up 90% of food allergic reactions in the United States. So definitely we see a lot of the top nine. We see a lot of preferences like vegan and vegetarianism as well, but I have learned about so many different types of dietary restrictions or allergies throughout the years. It's always such a fun challenge to get to help each of them figure out how to navigate safely on our campus.
All of them are so unique and their needs are so unique and what they value from their food and the cross contact piece to that too is, like I said, it's a puzzle that we get to solve for every day, and I think dieticians are uniquely suited to help solve that puzzle for each student. So Brandon, before we end, do you have any last thoughts or information that our audience should know?
I do. So I know we touched on Allergen Solutions and AllerTrain train quite a bit, but there is more. We have a wide variety of tools and trainings and enablers that are available on Aramark Safe Portal to help engage, educate, and inform all employees on a daily basis. And these are inclusive of safe briefs that you can use during pre-shift or pre-service huddles. It's a weekly topic. We have two safe briefs that pertain to food allergies. There's also, in addition, training videos. We have our fishing glove cartoon training videos series, which is super fun, engaging. It's a little bit different from your conventional corporate training, but we love it and figure, give it a plug. In addition to that, also, if you're in collegial hospitality, we have the campus readiness plan. And I would definitely suggest everyone go visit the Aramark Safe Portal as a great jumping off point for all things food allergies. It's a great one-stop shop, so check it out.
If you want to know more about Aramark's allergen solutions, visit our newsroom on aramark.com to access more information. Brandon and Gillian, thanks for joining us. And thanks, as always, to our listeners for tuning in to Mark This!
