Mark This! Podcast, Episode 13, Highly Regulated Culinary
Host: Heather Dotchel, Corporate Communications
Guests: Beth Ann Engelland, Vice President of Operational Excellence for Aramark Student Nutrition; Randy Bain, Vice President for Culinary Development for Aramark Correctional 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.
Aramark serves people the world over. It's what we do well and we are committed to providing meals to folks from all walks of life. But if you've ever eaten at a professional sports stadium, a campus dining hall, a workplace cafeteria, or a number of other places, you know that the food that is served varies greatly. What you may not know is that each industry has standards and regulations that govern what can be served.
Today we are speaking with two of our lines of business that provide food in highly regulated industries. Please welcome Beth Ann Engelland, Vice President of Operational Excellence for Aramark Student Nutrition. And Randy Bain, Vice President for Culinary Development for Aramark Correctional Services.
Welcome to the program and thank you for helping us to understand your respective businesses. Beth Ann, can you introduce yourself to our audience and tell us how operational excellence fits into the culinary world of our K-12 students and student nutrition?
Beth Ann Engelland (01:43):
Absolutely. I am the vice president of OPEX for Student Nutrition, which means I wear a few hats. So traditionally, OPEX mainly focuses on food and labor productivity, but in student nutrition, my team is also responsible for managing the USDA regulations, and most importantly, our culinary and menu strategy. Everything from ingredients to recipes to what makes it on the menu and how OPEX fits into the culinary world is unique. Our recipes that are corporate development chefs and our partner or industry chefs, they make amazing, delicious on-trend recipes, but as is many times they simply won't fit into our menu standards.
So how we get around this is twofold. If we see a recipe we like, we can try to student nutritionist it and make it whole grain, make it low sodium and pack in as many fruits and veggies as possible. But another way we innovate is we give our field chefs a voice. We have a team of 15 chef managers and executive chefs that represent each region of the US and we get together and socialize new products and new recipes. These chefs go back to their districts and test the recipes with students, and it's really a win-win. We get immediate feedback from students we serve and we have a representative voice from the communities we serve. Our chefs on the culinary alliance are honestly amazing. They're so invested in their service to the students and making the best possible recipes and choices. It's really great to work with them.
Fantastic. Beth Ann, that's a really great succinct explanation of how that works together. Randy, tell us a bit about yourself as a chef and your career as well as your unique position in our corrections service.
Thanks, Heather. Great to be with you guys. As a chef, it's the lens that I see everything through and I always look at all of our facilities in that manner, where food is being delivered, how we move it around the facility, and how we get it to the incarcerated individuals who in the majority of our locations are the ones preparing food. As a chef, this particular position was very unexpected and extremely interesting to me because as I've gone on in my career, I believe it's time to focus on community, focus on giving back, focusing on how to have an impact outside of what I do day to day. When this job popped up and I had an opportunity to talk to Tim Bartram, our president, he proposed something really unique and different, bringing a culinary perspective to a business that traditionally isn't chef driven. So bringing all of my experience, I've been with Aramark for 27 years, I've been a chef for longer than that to this business, has been a great learning experience as well as allowing me to bring that experience to the table every day.
I'd like to start by having each of you walk us through a general summary of the regulations that your business works with to ground the audience and myself so we understand where you're heading forward with this. Beth Ann regulations for meals in primary and secondary schools are highly visible in the US media. They're usually a priority for federal administrations. All of this being very understandable as we want our students, our children's nutrition in this country to be a priority. I'd like to ask you to walk us through a couple questions, and they are big ones. So the first thing I'm going to ask you to explain is what does this landscape look like, nutrition in the K-12 grades, and then secondly, what are the challenges associated with these regulations? How do you overcome?
Beth Ann Engelland (05:56):
Yeah, it's a great question. I'll start really broad first and say that we have many regulations in student nutrition, but as it pertains to nutrition and what is on the tray, we have nutrient standards, so very specific guidelines for nutrients and food group standards. So we're always looking at how much protein is on the plate, but then we also have to look at sodium and saturated fat and calorie level requirements as well. Over the last three years, the regulatory landscape has been pretty wild with a lot of moving pieces. And as of today, we're technically operating under the transitional standards, which means this July we take another decrease in sodium, 10% and everything else will stay consistent for this upcoming school year.
Right on the horizon, there are proposed regulations pending for next school year and beyond, and those are quite material changes to the regulations. So we're expecting some form of those proposed regulations to pass. The USDA is proposing over the next five years to reduce sodium, an additional 30%, create added sugar limits and potentially limit the ability to serve flavored milk to some students. So I would say the challenges are and will be how to create meals that are exciting and appetizing for students while staying in the box. There's my air quotes. We love and hate this challenge. We love this challenge because we want what's best for our students and so many of the students we serve really depend on our meals, but we also think it teeters on being very limiting to what we can offer to our students.
So how do we overcome these challenges? We get creative and we work together. We work with our industry partners and chefs and like I mentioned in the last question, we encourage creativity with our field chefs. So one of the benefits of our refurbished culinary alliance is that we have really quick turnaround on our development cycles. The best thing about students is they give immediate and direct feedback. It's a very quick go or no go for us. So if we like an idea, we move on it quickly.
Randy, let's take a look at these same questions through the lens of your business. Corrections meals do not have the greatest reviews. Can you explain how the American Correctional Agencies regulate food and how we work not only to meet those guidelines, but to surpass them? As part of this, I think our audience would be really interested in learning more about your team's expertise and how menus are developed because it's not something we hear about every day.
No, it's not. And thanks for the question, Heather. The American Correctional Agency that regulates food and gives us our guidelines, there's nothing mysterious there. They are a set of expectations that we view as basic blocking and tackling of running a food service operation within a facility. So of course, food safety is the highest of standards that folks go home the same way they come in and including any incarcerated individuals that we might be working with or any officers. I think there's some interesting things in the way of a 14 hour rule that we have. We can't surpass that 14 hours between meal periods.
So again, that's just something we work within the client and the facility to say what times are we going to be feeding people, basically delivering on all medical and religious diets. And there are more than I ever thought. Every single day we're getting anywhere from 10 to 15 special diet requests, and we work very closely with medical, and I'll get to that in a second. Nutritional, caloric intake and now like Beth Ann says, sodium is becoming a very big thing as it relates to heart healthy and all kinds of things.
So all these standards that they're asking for us, that's a medium bar. The way we exceed that expectation is quality to me is consistency, being on time, being reliable, no surprises. We take this all very, very seriously. As far as my team goes, boy, they're incredible. And it was the best surprise I got when I joined the team is I have a team of certified dieticians, we call them noss. They are responsible across the business regionally and are assigned to each facility across our portfolio to ensure that they're meeting those expectations from a menu and diet perspective.
The challenge on top of that, if anybody's been living under a rock as we've just come out of COVID and the entire supply chain world has been turned upside down, so we can't generalize on our menus as much as I would like to. We have to be very specific within each client, within each RFP that we answer based on their requirements. So there is no one best way across 500 plus facilities. This is us answering individual needs across the business. So they are incredible at what they do. They have to make adjustments to the menu based on substitutions, based on out of stock items, and we track that closely diligently with supply chain.
Beth Ann Engelland (11:52):
So Randy, I love how you talk about your support team and your team of your registered dieticians. I think it's so important that we have a true partnership between culinary and nutrition for the registered dieticians and supply chain, it is all three and finance and marketing and everything else. But those three, I feel like I sent to supply chain every other day, and I'm constantly running ideas by the dieticians on my team and the culinary. I just spent the last two questions talking about our culinary alliance and all of our culinary partnerships, but it's so important that we highlight how many registered dieticians we have working in our businesses. Our operations teams are not doing this alone. We don't put all of that expectation on them. We have a great support team as well and student nutrition. So I just love that Randy was talking about his support team.
Yeah. I would say well said, and thank you. And just so the listeners know, Beth Ann and I talk on a regular, and we have a lot in common. We have a lot of challenges that are similar and the fact that you yourself are a registered dietician, is that correct? Yeah, you have that extra superpower. So our dieticians are responsible for approving and signing off on every diet there is across the country. And there are too many to mention at this point.
And I think that's a really important point. These aren't haphazards menus thrown together for the next week. These are meticulously planned and evaluated and scrutinized meals to best serve the nutritional needs of all of those people who eat our food. And I don't think that can be over-emphasized because I think that's something that's often overlooked when people are looking at the food around them. I mean, how many millions of meals go through just your two lines of business? It's an incredible undertaking and something that can never be too appreciated.
Yeah. I think about it, excellence just doesn't happen. It's a series of well-orchestrated events that have to happen in concert every single day of the week while nobody's watching and we get the job done. And whether you're in a school or whether you're in a facility, you have to plan in advance. You have to make sure you have your act together. You can't do anything by yourself. In some instances, we're feeding thousands of people at a time. So it's a challenge, but something we both do pretty well.
I want to back up just a little bit to what Beth Ann was saying earlier. So our know or no go from our student tasters, that student engagement is a huge part of what you do and customer engagement in any of our lines of business is a huge part of what we do. But Beth Ann, what do you say to the student who wants to know why school lunch doesn't taste like what they're getting at their favorite fast food chain?
Beth Ann Engelland (15:23):
I love this question. I would say first and foremost, we don't taste like fast food because we aren't fast food. It's as simple as that. We don't deep fat fry. Our ingredients are full grain and everything is made with lower sodium. We serve age appropriate portions. Everything is fresh and healthy. So as an operator, I proudly ate school lunch every day, every single day. However, the first part of your question is really important. Top of mind focus for all of our operators right now is if you think about student engagement, we have to approach it a little bit differently. So if you think about the traditional education system, students don't have a ton of choices that they can make in their day-to-day, but they absolutely do at lunch. They get to exercise their choice, and that's really important. So we have a number of ways that we engage with our students for menu feedback.
We ask and ask and ask again. So we survey students, we survey parents, we hold student focus groups, we taste test new recipes monthly at all of our secondary campuses. And like I said before, students aren't shy about what they like and don't like. So the simple answer is we listen. We've had a ton of fun menu feedback recently, and we take it all into consideration with what we are seeing with our trend data as well. One of our recent focus groups in the Chicago area had said that they wanted us to bring in their favorite chicken fast food restaurant. And while we can't accomplish that ask, we did end up taking a hard look at our chicken products and we found some different products to offer. So this fall, our new chicken sandwich is featured on our menus all over the country to try to answer that student feedback.
Okay. Randy now, the piece that I want to revisit from earlier in our conversation is about the fact that your role is quite unique, and that was one of the things that drew you to it, and I really do think it sets Aramark's business apart from competitors. It's a new role for you, it's a new role for the business. What do you hope to accomplish in the next few years? What's coming down the pike that would be outside of the expected?
Well, we're going to continually work to demystify what goes on inside of our facilities. There's some bad stereotypes out there, and really we wake up every day to do a good job, to be consistent, to deliver fresh food on time, and we're held to the guidelines that are given to us by our clients. It's not our job. If they want us to write the menu, then believe me, we can do that. However, they give us these guidelines and restrictions and things that they hope to see, not only in the way of products, in a way of local purchasing, also in the way of cost. So if the budget is difficult and is challenging, then there's only so much we can do within that budget.
Recently we opened up a new piece of business pretty big, and the powers that be on that side really gave us some great things to work on. They gave us fresh produce, they gave us fresh proteins and things like that where really the menu can sing and do its job. I think food is life and food is where people come together. And back to Beth Ann saying about choice, there is no real choice when you're in a facility, you line up and you get what's there. So we do our best with that.
As far as the future goes, listen, I think culinary influence is going to continue to play a role in the way we write a menu, the way we think about presentation and the way we bring our skillsets, our ability to cook. As you've talked about in previous episodes, our interwork program is pretty amazing. Where we're training incarcerated individuals, how to work in a kitchen, how to work as a team, how to read a recipe, all those things. That's not the standard across the board. We're working with limited skill sets and not the best of equipment in some instances. So we do what we can with what we got. If we can have a chance to influence that, if we have an opportunity to build out a culinary team, boy that that's where I'd really like to go.
Thanks for that forecast, Randy. A little glimpse into what you hope to do in the future. Beth Ann, you just mentioned the new chicken meal that we're quite excited about. Do you have any other upcoming menu paths that you can share that you think will foster some delight?
Beth Ann Engelland (20:18):
Yes. I would say that we are hyper-focused on plant forward options. So not everyone identifies as a full vegan or vegetarian all the time, but we definitely know that some people prefer vegetarian options from time to time. So one of the options I'm really excited about is the southwest chipotle nachos that we developed for one of our fall limited time offers. And it features chipotle, peppers in sauce, and we have beans and cheese and jalapenos and cilantro, and it's a really great vegetarian option that's served on nachos, which is really friendly to students. Who doesn't love nachos? I am excited for more plant forward options on our menus, and we've also tagged vegan and vegetarian options in our menu database. So now when parents and students go to their school website and look at the menu, they'll be able to see what's available to them.
Sounds quite delicious. Randy, I would like to ask you if you have an example of a meal that we serve in correctional facilities that's outside the box?
Well, lately we've been focusing on visitation meals. It's an opportunity for us when families come in to visit an incarcerated individual to break bread as a family. Food is life, food is comfort, food is home, and we can do anything from pasta, Caesar salad and tiramisu to southwestern to burgers and fries. It's just up to them. Usually it's pretty simple and it's just fresh and it's served to them at the table so they can enjoy together as a family.
All right. Well, thanks for sharing all of that. To our audience, would you like to know more about Aramark's culinary offerings? Visit our newsroom on aramark.com to access more information. I'd like to offer a huge thank you to Beth Ann and Randy, and I'd like to thank our listeners for tuning in to Mark This.
