This fall, Quest Food Management Services launched the Quest Innovation Kitchen (QIK), bringing chefs from across the company together to collaborate, create inspired recipes and elevate the K-12 dining experience.
The QIK operates at three levels. The core group consists of 12 to 15 executive chefs, district managers, sous chefs, general managers and foodservice directors; the second tier is a group of contributors; and the third tier is a digital network.
The model is designed to foster collaboration, build relationships, and strengthen Quest’s internal culinary network, allowing ideas and expertise to flow across locations and teams.
Spurring innovation is critically important for foodservice contractors to keep menus fresh, customers satisfied, and to engage chefs and other employees.
For QIK, the core group gathers both virtually and in person (at least quarterly) to share culinary inspiration, develop and test recipes, and identify ways to connect with customers through food. This group works on projects that will affect all Quest accounts.
“There will be hands-on days where we cook, test ideas, and learn from one another,” says Daniel Warrillow, director of vision and innovation at Quest in Lombard, Illinois. The group will also meet the people behind the food, from farmers to suppliers, and bring those connections back to the kitchen.
Staff in the contributors group get involved on a project basis, bringing their particular skills and expertise. Many run busy accounts, so this gives them a flexible way to contribute and allows QIK to benefit from their knowledge.
The network level includes every Quest employee, allowing everyone to provide input, via a Teams chat channel, and provide ideas and suggestions digitally, which encourages employees to become involved.
“I saw what cool things different operations are doing but they’re not shared across the business,” says Warrillow. “We have great relationships with clients but don’t have a lot of time to talk with each other.”
This fall the core team is actively working on school salad bars and pasta bars, looking at creating new recipes, new ideas, making them more visually appealing. It’s also looking at adding new flavors, examining how the bars can be elevated, but how the offerings can fit into any part of Quest’s business.
Phoenix3 Collective, an integrated hospitality and culinary management company in Waltham, Mass., that provides foodservice to sectors including senior living, healthcare, and B&I, created The Pass this fall as a single hub that brings its culinary, nutrition, operations, and training resources together in one place, and as a space for its chefs to brainstorm and innovate.
For example, this fall chefs worked on creating kosher and halal dishes suitable for every diet. The company prefers to focus on inclusivity so a dish suits everyone, rather than a small group, says Matthew Thompson, chief culinary officer and executive vice president of operational excellence. Thompson works within the Pass to “consolidate and capture these ideas.”
And because The Pass is AI-enabled, Thompson says, it’s easy to use. Someone working on the kosher menus could ask the AI who he or she should contact within Phoenix3 to talk about that and the AI could arrange a meeting with that person; or it could provide specific kosher recipes.
Getting Competitive
Sodexo is tapping into its chefs’ creativity with an annual culinary competition for its B&I segment that empowers chefs to experiment, develop new recipes and bring fresh ideas to the dining experience.
It launched the Corporate Services Culinary Challenge at the beginning of this year with the goal of seeing “who could come up with the craziest idea, the best innovation,” says Brendan Dougherty, vice president of culinary for North America. “It’s incredible when you get all these chefs together and start to see what they come up with.”
Between 40 and 50 chefs sent in written recipes and a photo of the dish to participate. The judging team then picked their favorites and put the entrants into four regional teams of three. The teams competed against each other at the competition, held at a Sodexo account in New York City, making a small plate, entrée, and a dessert.
Sodexo’s Corporate Services Culinary Challenge allows B&I chefs to flex their creative muscles. Photo courtesy of Sodexo.
The entrants were invited to be as innovative as they wanted with their recipes with the caveat that they had to be able to be deployed and served at a Sodexo account, Dougherty says. “It’s good to see the innovation and what’s out there from our chefs but then we say we love this idea, how do we reverse engineer it into something we can deploy in our business.”
The competition brings pride to the chefs, he says. “I wanted the chefs to shine.” The winning recipes make it into Sodexo’s recipe database and have the chefs’ names attached to them. “I wanted to spur healthy competition between chefs, drive innovation and drive recruitment at the same time,” Dougherty says.
The winning recipes this year were polenta cannoli, fall gnocchi, and a Sicilian custard, all developed by chef Alessio Selleri, who works at a B&I manufacturing account. The person who developed the recipe is named as the winner, even though he or she worked with a team to create it.
It was important, says Dougherty, that the winning recipe will work in all kinds of B&I accounts from blue collar locations to high level financial services white collar locations.
Looking outside
Parkhurst Dining based out of Homestead, Pennsylvania is looking beyond its employees for innovation. A year ago it launched Student Soundbites that’s made up of more than 110 students in partnership with a third-party research firm, so the students can share their insights.
“As we’ve been doing strategic planning for our brands we knew there were things we wanted to learn and do a deeper dive into,” says Suzie Lachut, vice president of partnership development and marketing.
There are different ways for students to participate, though almost everything is digital. Students can use virtual pinboards to feature visuals of food or brands they like; they can respond to multiple choice questionnaires; they can provide diaries (written, spoken or video); and Parkhurst can ask specific questions about trends to see if it’s something worth pursuing. Through Student Soundbites, students can also participate in digital focus groups where live dialogue can help.
Students usually have around two weeks to respond to a prompt or survey. “We built this with the busy student in mind,” says Lachut.
Parkhurst aims to dig deep with the students and chooses high-level themes. In the first year it asked: What’s your definition of healthy? What’s your definition of variety? What’s your daily and weekly schedule like? Students provide insight into everything from how they make dining decisions, to what they’re looking for in their physical dining spaces.
“What’s really important with these insights is the now-what of the questions so we can take these to our chefs and see what they do with them,” says Lachut.
Everything is facilitated through the third party platform that runs this, with prompts from Parkhurst telling it what information the contractor would like to know.
Parkhurst’s chefs are really responding to this, says Lachut. “It’s been really validating for them. And it’s been really rewarding to bring the insights back to the operation and get their feedback and see what will work.”
Parkhurst leaned heavily on its campus teams to find the students who would become part of Student Soundbites. “It was important to have a diverse group of perspectives,” Lachut says. About a quarter of the Soundbite students are athletes who have very specific nutritional needs, which, she says, “has made for rich insights.”
The program has now moved into its second year. About a quarter of the first year’s students returned, and Parkhurst asked former participants to recommend new students. There’s a lot of natural attrition, however, as seniors graduate. “It was really great to see a decent core rejoined us this year so we have some consistency but also a new cohort,” says Lachut.
Parkhurst’s campus clients love the Student Soundbites program. “They appreciate that at every single campus we are aligned to that campus’ objectives, their goals and student tastes,” says Lachut. “It strengthens our client partnership and they know we listen with intention, that we apply what we’re learning to the strategic direction of the business.”
Mostly Parkhurst is looking for learnings from this program that are broad and can be applied across accounts. However, if a student provides feedback that’s helpful at the unit level. It’s easy to contact someone at that account and pass it on, Lachut says. “We are nimble enough to be responsive to those types of feedback.”
