First Person Singular...

After Compass acquired Food Works, one of the first things I got to do was help open up the Boeing business in Seattle, where I and many, many other people converted 48 units in 48 hours. The most rewarding thing about that project on a professional level was seeing the customers come in on Monday morning and being thrilled with the food they saw. That was so cool! On a more personal level, that project was also rewarding because it was where I met my husband, who was working for Compass at the time.

I was excited about the Boeing project because I’d never been to Seattle. Unfortunately, we were so busy, getting up at three or four in the morning and going til eight or nine at night that about all I saw of Seattle was Mt. Rainier when I stepped out the back dock door.

I left Compass because I had been in operations for a really long time and it was important for me to learn the business from the other side, from another perspective. Also, the international aspect of the Dell job really drew me.

I guess what was most surprising about the international operations at Dell was how similar they were. Even from country to country, when you go into the buildings, you know you’re still in a Dell account.

We find that almost anywhere that we do a survey, the first thing everybody complains about is pricing. It doesn’t matter where you are. The impact of the economy all over the world is surprisingly similar. And I’m not talking just at Dell. What I realized in my travels recently is that it really is a small world and what we do is much like that recent earthquake in Chile, which caused a tsunami somewhere else. What happens here affects overseas and vice versa.

In B&I, we’re going to have to do things differently than before. We have to think differently and pay attention to what college students are doing, what are they eating and how are they eating. I think we have to stay hand in hand with the guys in NACUFS and say, ‘Hey, what are you doing to keep these kids happy?’ Because what I  nd is that our customer is increasingly sophisticated and even in a down economy they want value and they want good food.

I also think that we need to be cognizant of regional preferences. What works in Phoenix doesn’t necessarily work in California, which doesn’t work somewhere else. So the onesize-fits-all corporate marketing program really needs to be looked at on a regional basis. And that’s going to be increasingly dif cult as we decrease head counts.

I think that if an in-house foodservice isn’t costing a lot of money and is perceived as a value, then there’s no issue with justifying it. But if it’s highly subsidized, that’s where the difficulties lie. They are constantly looking at the costs and they will do that even more so when it comes to maintenance, smallwares and other things that aren’t obvious subsidies but that are costs to the corporation.