Dave Prentkowski knew what he wanted. Back in 1997, the director of food services at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, IN, was charged with updating the venerable campus’s foodservice facilities. After talking to colleagues, researching options with a foodservice consultant and visiting numerous other sites—including some outside of the higher education segment— Prentkowski concluded that what Notre Dame needed was a centralized production operation.

Centralized production on the scale he was envisioning was a radical departure from Notre Dame’s traditional foodservice operations, but Prentkowski had enough experience— and certainly a better knowledge than anyone else of what was best for Notre Dame’s dining operation— to proceed with confidence and determination.

Ultimately, what Notre Dame ended up with “was pretty close to what I originally envisioned,” he says. That vision—still one of the segment’s showcase operations— would not have been possible but for Prentkowski’s determination, involvement and credibility with the university, which of course had to approve the plans and the budget.

Similarly, at Fairfax (VA) County Schools, the system’s kitchen designs and equipment specs for its new and renovated school cafeterias all bear the indelible stamp of Penny McConnell’s influence. McConnell, director of food & nutrition services for the system, works closely with the district’s Design & Construction department and its architect. However, as a veteran of school foodservice operations, she won’t compromise what her experience tells her are the best design and equipment options for her units.

Take sinks. All the new and renovated kitchens have a certain model because McConnell decided that is the best option and “I convinced Design & Construction that that’s the way to go.” Flooring? “I require that we use ceramic tile under sinks—it took me three years for that one, but I finally convinced them,” McConnell says matter-of-factly.

Today, she is battling for windows in kitchens and testing combi-ovens without broilers. If she decided that’s what’s best for Fairfax Schools, don’t bet against her getting it.

“If I need an X and the dealer says Y, I’ll say, ‘No, I want an X!’” she says in summing up her idea of supplier relationships. “We are so specific because equipment is a very costly item.”

Prentkowski and McConnell are excellent examples of the aggressively involved foodservice director in the areas of facility design and equipment specification. But they are hardly exceptions.

As pressures to boost efficiencies while producing ever higher quality dining solutions mount, FSDs in all segments are insisting on greater control over their means of production. And that includes more detailed involvement with blueprints and equipment specs than many would have imagined only a decade or so ago.

Planning for the long-term

Call it a necessary survival strategy.

“At the end of the day, the director and the department will be there working with the equipment, long after the consultant and the architect are gone,” says Lynne Ometer, director of food & nutrition services for Emory Hospitals in Atlanta, in explaining the motivation for the increased attention. “That being the case, we need to have a critical role in deciding what that equipment is.”

The alternative is not always pretty. “When I first came here, the district didn’t understand why foodservice directors need to be involved in the design and specifying process,” says Mary Kate Harrison, general manager of food and nutrition services for Hillsborough (FL) County School District.

“People were making decisions based on what they thought we should have. As a result we ended up with things like coolers and freezers that were way too small for our needs.”

And whose record ultimately reflects the resulting drag on productivity that such amateur involvement produces? Every director knows the answer to that question.

All this was much less of an issue in the past, when manpower was plentiful, menus simple and subsidies generous. Under such conditions, FSDs understandably tended to keep a distance from design and equipment decisions, preferring to put their energies where their core expertise lay—in producing food. If equipment went underutilized or even unused, there were enough redundant systems in place to make it largely irrelevant.

No more. Today, few foodservice directors can afford not to be involved, though many are still living with the legacies of past disengagement— inadequate storage, convoluted ergonomics, cramped production spaces and fancy electronic whiz-bangs that are about as practical in an institutional kitchen as a catcher’s mitt in a sewing circle. Some of the worst offenders are so-called experts who are beyond their expertise when they take on foodservice spaces. “One thing you never want is an architect designing a kitchen,” opines Patty Guist, director of associate services for Humana, Inc., in Louisville, KY. “Nothing against architects, but they don’t know kitchens, and certainly not commercial kitchens. The best person to design a kitchen is someone who has managed or worked in one.”

Big bucks, carefully spent

The trend of FSDs taking a larger role in facility design and equipment specifying issues has emerged recently for a variety of reasons. Certainly, control over production infrastructure is a major factor— perhaps the major factor—as Ometer notes. After all, few things are more crucial to how well an operation ultimately functions than the way space is allocated, how systems are set up and what equipment is specified and installed.

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