Heidtman was involved in helping develop many of these and points to the learning curve they entailed for staff.

200 Years of Dining Tradition Established in 1809, Miami is the seventholdest university in the country and has dining traditions just as storied as its academic history. Students originally cooked in their rooms. Records show that in 1832, $50 would have paid for a year’s tuition, room and books with prepared meals available locally for one dollar a week. The first dining room was opened in 1849 in Stoddard Hall. Stoves in the kitchen were coal-fired and refrigeration was supplied by daily deliveries of ice. Many students worked as waiters in the full service dining rooms to subsidize tuition. By 1922, 36-week board fees were $162 for women and $180 for men. Miami enjoyed steady growth after WWI and new residence and dining halls were built to handle it. Foodservice made a great leap in 1932 when MU constructed the dedicated “Central Food Store” on Elm Street. It provided refrigerated and dry storage and facilities to make ice and ice cream, pasteurize milk and house a central bakery. The operation was groundbreaking at the time and helped MU keep board costs low. It also established a tradition of central production that presaged the Culinary Support Center operated today. MU’s original “Central Food Store” on Elm Street. During WWII,the school’s facilities were used to train over 10,000 cooks and bakers for the Navy. In the 1950s, the school eliminated maid and wait service and introduced buffet-style self-service dining, which remained the primary service model until the late 1980s. Today, Miami’s dining program includes five buffet-style dining halls and 16 a la carte operations that offer a full range of retail dining service options. It operates five c-stores, including Market Street at McCracken, the largest, which alone does about $2.6 million in annual sales. The department also manages over a dozen brands, ranging from Uncle Phil’s Express (a takeout line used across campus) to Miami Twister (a pretzel concept) to fully-developed restaurants like La Mia Cucina and Panache. The newest concept, Dividends, will open in the new Farmer Business School this fall.

“Learning to add brand value to our offerings was a completely new frontier on the campus and it required a lot of training and changes in attitudes. As production began to move from the kitchen to front of the house, we began outfitting staff with the kind of uniforms you'd see in commercial restaurants. There was much more focus on the customer and we began to benchmark ourselves not against food at other colleges, but against national brand restaurants.”

At the Shriver Center, Marijo Nootz was intent on establishing a strong campus brand for what had been a modest catering operation (see sidebar, p. 28). “We wanted Carillon Catering to have identity separate from Shriver, to be seen as the place to call no matter what your catering needs were,” Nootz says. “We upgraded menus to make them broader and more flexible and simplified pricing and ordering.”

Nancy Heidtman

By the late 1990s, “our emphasis shifted again,” says Miller, and the department began a long term look at how it could achieve better efficiencies in the new enviornment. Attention turned to the 80-year old facility on Elm Street that was then known as the “Central Food Store.”

A drive for efficiency

The four-story food warehouse and production center was inefficient, but still essential. In the late 1990s, Nancy Heidtman had taken on responsibility for it as part of her brand management role.

“It had a bakery on the third floor and still had some meat cutting going on another floor,” she says. “We had just begun to dabble in commissary operations. The warehouse, refrigerated space and receiving and loading facilities were antiquated. Operating from the facility — there is no other way to say it — had become painful.”

After four years of planning, the department opened a new Culinary Support Center in 2001 that addressed these limitations and provided the resources to help it drive the production efficiencies it needed to supply components to its many campus operations (see sidebar on p. 24). As one example, “We previously were cutting salad bar lettuce in ten different kitchens,” says Heidtman. “Today, four people process 3600 pounds of romaine and iceburg lettuce in a four hour period twice a week, and that takes care of the entire campus.”

Under Mike Mitroi, the department took on responsibility for managing its own vending machines, a move that let them be used with the debit card. It also lets the department customize vend machine offerings to particular demographics at different locations on campus.

Technology also began playing a much larger role. Today, customers at the Scoreboard Market in Martin Hall use their ID cards to place to-go food orders on kiosk terminals at the entrance. These are produced in the kitchen and barcoded so they can be scanned at checkout, improving accuracy and speeding up the lines. At La Mia Cucina, customers place orders in a similar way before seating themselves, speeding food production.

All the products made at the Culinary Center are similarly barcoded so that individually-packed items can be scanned at point of sale or, in the case of bulk product, in the date-stamping and inventory tracking process.

Procurement strategy is also an important part of Miami's effort to manage costs. The school uses an aggressive system of competitive bidding, warehousing stock for redistribution on the campus. It buys from more than a half dozen major broadliners, several specialty distributors and, often, directly from manufacturers. Recently, it joined ProVista, an arm of the Novation group purchasing organization, to further leverage its buying clout.

Priorities for the future

Brand management remains a key part of Miami's strategy, “but while we come up with new ideas all the time, our bar is pretty high in terms of moving forward with them,” says Heidtman. The department is looking to reduce the number of brands it supports, she says, so it can focus on the strongest identities in its portfolio.