The Importance of Operational Excellence

by Bill Seufert - Principal, Prism Hospitality Group, LLC

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When you hear the words “operational excellence” what comes to your mind? Even if you are not familiar with this term, chances are you have assisted in the execution of or have been on the receiving end of operational excellence. Delivering operational excellence is crucial to the success  any customer-centric business and is especially important in the hospitality services industry.

Operational Excellence can be defined as “A philosophy of the workplace where problem-solving, teamwork, and leadership results in the ongoing improvement in an organization. The process involves focusing on the customers' needs, keeping the employees positive and empowered, and continually improving the current activities in the workplace.”

While operational excellence and continuous improvement are not the same, they are closely related in concept and principle.

In order for operational excellence to truly be successful, every person, at every level of the organization must be consistently involved in the execution, because every role (should be) involved in doing something that brings value to the customer.  As such, their role is part of the critical path to success.

Many consider Dr. Shiego Shingo to be the Father of operational excellence.  Dr. Shingo wrote about ensuring quality at the source, flowing value and just in time inventory, long before Six Sigma became well known and popular.

Dr Shingo’s ten principles of operational excellence include:

• Respect for Every Individual – when people feel respected, they are more likely to become emotionally invested in achieving the desired result.

• Lead with Humility – Leaders must be willing to seek input, listen and learn.

• Seek Perfection – while not realistically attainable, seeking perfection creates an environment for a culture of operational excellence.  Individuals and team that seek perfection focus on long term solutions, rather than temporary fixes.

• Embrace Scientific Thinking – this includes the testing of ideas with experimentation, observation and analysis (think of Lean Six Sigma as a process tool here).

• Focus on Process - Even the smartest and most engaged employees cannot consistently produce high-quality results with poor processes.

• Assure Quality at the Source - Excellence can only be attained when every element of work is performed correctly the first time. If there is a problem, it must be uncovered and fixed where and when it was created.

• Flow & Pull Value - Maximizing value for customers means creating it in response to demand and maintaining an uninterrupted flow. When the flow is disrupted or when excess inventory occurs, waste is produced.

• Think Systemically - Operationally excellent organizations understand that processes are intertwined and that the most significant problems often occur when work is moved from one process or team to another.

• Create Consistency of Purpose – Strategic alignment within all levels of a business or organization is required to achieve operational excellence.

• Create Value for the Customer – as business professionals, we know that customer value is defined mainly by what and how much the customer is willing to pay for a particular good or service.

A business method that works hand in hand with operational excellence is Lean Six Sigma. Although they are not the same thing, they do amplify each other when used correctly. Lean Six Sigma is different from the traditional Six Sigma; here’s a look at the differences and how together, Lean and Six Sigma complement one another.

Lean is different from Six Sigma because its main focus is efficiency.  Lean is concerned with “inefficient activities within operational processes that are attributed to delays, errors, or waste”. Its main goal is to keep those three things to a minimum in order to maximize efficiency.  Complementing Lean, Six Sigma emphasizes the quality and consistency of a company’s products and services.

When Lean and Six Sigma are combined, Lean Six Sigma is the result. Lean Six Sigma serves as a hybrid of the two methods. In the end, it “combines the best of Six Sigma (quality and consistency) with the best of Lean (efficiency) to help organizations deliver maximum customer value through efficient operations and high-quality standards.”  Using the Lean Six Sigma approach can ultimately result in the production of higher quality products and services and thus contributes to a higher level of operational excellence.

Operational excellence is a key ingredient in the long-term success of any organization, and in the world of hospitality, it is of utmost importance. Significant components of operational excellence are providing top-notch service to customers and listening to their feedback.  Another component is empowering employees. Creating a positive environment focused on teamwork makes everyone feel included. Building up a team of individuals who work well together not only maximizes productivity but increases output.

Operational excellence might look a little different depending on the type of business establishing and implementing it, and ultimately it is a vital tool, as operational excellence contributes to the success of businesses both far and wide. Providing excellent products and services, empowering employees, listening to your guests and continuous improvement will not go unnoticed by your customers.   So, what does operational excellence mean to you?

Foodservice and the Environment. Small ideas with big impact.

by Bernadette Ventura

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1.      Deploy technology:  Incoming student and workforce populations expect it!

• Lose the clipboard and manage all inventory functions electronically, including taking inventory, ordering, checking-in, etc.

• Use guest facing technologies like QR coded menus; order kiosks; APP ordering; and self-checkout. Eliminate receipts unless by guest request.

• Aim to work entirely paperless. “Walk the talk” by distributing reports and dashboards electronically only. 

• Lose the other clipboard and conduct all operations evaluations/audits via tablet or phone, delivering results electronically. 

2.      Recycle:  You might say, “we already recycle.”  I’ve seen many sites where there are receptacles for recycling, yet find mixed trash and recyclables in them.  There is a way, and it takes persistence and ongoing education. Once a program is implemented, follow-up with periodic audits for accuracy, more education and champions of the program. 

3.      Minimize food waste:

• Purchase from local farms and purveyors whenever possible.  This not only supports the local farmer/economy, it also minimizes the distance products must travel to get to you.

• Manage inventory and food storage properly.  Don’t over-order; use FIFO; audit production records vs. sales; and collect and audit waste.

• Have all cooks and food production teams set aside waste for your Chef to inspect and track, prior to discarding. Your chef will likely identify a method by which a product can be more efficiently prepared, or ways in which some of the perceived waste might have been used. There are also electronic systems to track waste. Back to #1 – deploy tech!

• Give away coffee grounds to guests for use in their gardens, packing them in biodegradable paper bags.

• Offer delicious vegan menu items.  Animal proteins contribute to carbon emissions while plants help generate carbon dioxide and use far less water in production.

• Add an herb or microgreen growing cabinet.  Talk about Local!

• Use normal portion sizes as suggested by the USDA.  More isn’t always more!

4.      Reduce trash:  The EPA estimates that at least 60% of all restaurant/foodservice trash is food waste! Below are just a few tried and true options for trash reduction. 

• Compost: While there are some challenges related to composting, often to do with transportation and/or proximity to packaging locations, it has the potential to work at many locations.  Read more about composting here.

• Pulping/Grinding: A pulper pulverizes food waste into a slurry, then extracts the water. A shredder grinds the waste and then presses it to force out the liquids. These systems claim to reduce trash by >80%. 

• Dehydrating:  Dehydrating also reduces food waste by >80%.  They work by applying heat to dehydrate. 

• Digesters: Aerobic digesters turns food trash into gray water that gets released into the sewer system. Learn more at the link below from Waste Today.

5.      Eliminate plastic bottled beverages:  Include a strategy that replaces bottled water with filtered regular and bubbly water dispensers.  Consider installing fun beverage fountains like Coke’s Freestyle and Pepsi’s SodaStream.  Involve your audience distributing insulated tumblers with lids, and, if continuing to sell canned beverages, distribute cozies. It’s important to educate and involve your audience as this can be an initial inconvenience.  Include facts like the number of plastic bottled beverages used each year at a specific site, and, make an impact by illustrating the distance the bottles would span if placed end to end, such as, “New York to California” or “up and down Mt. Everest”.  Weight also makes for a powerful statement.

6.      Remove paper and plastic cups: Distribute hot/cold insulated tumblers with lids and ban the paper cup.  Again, educate and involve your audience (see comments in #5). 

7.      Use reusable clamshell containers:  Click here to read about one implementation of the reusable clamshell program.   

8.      Use grab & go containers made from post-consumer waste and compostable products.  Even if they go into landfill, compostable products will break down if they get air and water, unlike Styrofoam.

9.      If redesigning, assess your current impact: When it’s time to re-assess the environmental impact of your operation, consider just a few impactful actions such as:

• Insist on furniture and decor that are made from recycled and repurposed materials.

• Donate or recycle your old furniture and equipment.

• Use Energy Star-rated equipment.

• Have a lighting assessment done to ensure you are using the most energy efficient lighting. In fact, conduct an entire energy audit!

• Include sensor operated faucets for hand sinks. In fact, conduct an entire water audit.

• Consider hydroponic gardens.   

If you’re building a new site, make sure your foodservice design firm or architect has a sustainability expert on the team.

10.   Aim for the Green Restaurant Certification.  Go for it!

Prism Hospitality Group would be happy to help you implement the initiatives outlined above.  Contact us for a complimentary assessment!

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Interesting reads:

Rachel Carson and the impetus for widespread environmental awareness

An EPA Retrospect:  The first half-century

Sustainable Food Trust Vertical farming and hydroponics on the spectrum of sustainability

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health: The Nutrition Source

Dietary Guidelines for Americans

Waste Today: How on-site digesters are helping divert food waste from landfill

Waste 360. Dehydrators: The Next Generation of Food Waste Machines

CFO Selections: Spotlight on Preventing Waste

Volunteering in America’s Food Banks

by Chef Al McDonald

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In the mid-1960s, after a paralyzing injury and during rehabilitation in Phoenix, Arizona, John van Hengel began volunteering at a local soup kitchen. He solicited food donations, which resulted in far more food than the kitchen could use. Around this time, one of John’s clients told him that she regularly fed her children with discarded items from a grocery store garbage dumpster.  She told him that the food quality was fine, but that there should be a place where unwanted food could be deposited and later withdrawn by people who needed it, like a bank.

Van Hengel began to actively solicit unwanted food from grocery stores, local gardens, and nearby citrus groves.  His effort led to the creation of St. Mary's Food Bank Alliances, and with it St. Mary's Food Bank in Phoenix, the nation's first food bank.

In 1975, St. Mary's was awarded a federal grant to assist in developing food banks across the nation.  This effort was formally incorporated into a separate non-profit organization in 1976.

In 2001, America's Second Harvest merged with St. Mary’s Food Bank, which was the nation's largest food-rescue organization at that time.

In 2005, Feeding America began using an internal market with a synthetic currency called "shares" to more rationally allocate food. Currency is allocated based on the need, and then individual banks bid on which foods they want the most, based on local knowledge and ability to transport and store the food offered.  Negative prices are possible, so banks could  earn shares by picking up undesirable food. The previous centrally planned system had penalized banks for refusing any food offered, even if it was the wrong type to meet their needs, and this resulted in misallocations (“sending potatoes to Idaho”), food rotted away in places that did not need it, and the wrong types of food being delivered (e.g., not matching hot dogs with hot dog buns.)

In May 2007, the food bank market system was featured on ''American Idol' and in September 2008, the organization name was changed to Feeding America.

Prism Hospitality Group is committed to donating 5% of its net profits to local food banks, such as the North Texas Food Bank.  If DFW is your neighborhood, please visit the NTFB, or look for a local food bank in your area by checking with Feeding America, where you can find food banks in most states.  Whether it’s food or monetary donations, or sharing your time to volunteer, it all adds up.  No one in the United States should go hungry.

Ghost Kitchens – Fad or Future Industry Fixture?

by Bill Seufert - Principal, Prism Hospitality Group, LLC

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A ghost kitchen (also known as a delivery-only restaurant, virtual kitchen, shadow kitchen, commissary kitchen or dark kitchen) is a professional food preparation and cooking facility set up for the preparation of delivery-only meals. However, a ghost kitchen differs from a virtual restaurant in that a ghost kitchen is not necessarily exclusive to a single restaurant brand but may contain kitchen space for multiple brands.

Delivery-only food platforms seem to be a natural evolution from other trends: namely, delivery services like Seamless/Grubhub and UberEATS, which connect existing restaurants to the on-demand needs of consumers.  People are now more comfortable ordering online than ever before. Having food delivered is often easier than having to venture out to a restaurant or grocery store.  According to industry sources, the food delivery market is expected to grow from $43 Billion in 2017 to $76 Billion by 2022.

Kitchen United in Pasadena, CA, a pioneer and major player in the ghost kitchen space, has a collection of 25 different restaurant cuisines from which customers can choose.  Their website, https://order.kitchenunited.com/pasadena, features a variety of “collections” such as local favorites, light & fresh and vegan menu options for customers to browse and select desired menu choices for delivery or pick-up. Currently operating in 5 major cities in the US, Kitchen United has plans to open 11 Ghost Kitchens in Manhattan over the next several years.

In New York, Green Summit’s brands offer all sorts of cuisine “concepts,” including meatballs, salad/sandwich/juice, and burgers/grilled cheese.  Green Summit is just one example of a growing wave of ghost restaurants that skip the storefront and bring food straight to the customer.

For Green Summit, which has an exclusive agreement with Seamless/Grubhub for delivery, there’s one major benefit to operating a virtual restaurant: You can’t beat the cheap rent. The company’s midtown Manhattan commissary at 146 East 44th Street has had a big advantage from the start: It doesn’t have to devote square footage to customer seating and waiting areas.

“To the consumer, it’s very much a kitchen,” Peter Schatzberg, Founder of Green Summit says. “There’s an area with a grill, people working and portioning, and a room adjacent to the kitchen where orders are assembled. They’re all made to order, and stations are set up by category. For instance, there’s a sandwich area producing sandwiches for multiple brands. All the ingredients across brands are in the same areas, but you get specialization in staff where they focus on making salads and sandwiches, for instance. That’s all they do. It makes a better-quality product, which ties into economies of scale.”

Good Uncle is a New York-based startup which is currently test-marketing at Syracuse University in upstate New York. The company sets up agreements with established restaurants with limited or no delivery service in Syracuse to license their recipes and then recreate them in the Good Uncle commissary. Users—college students are a current target market—then order meals through the Good Uncle app or through GrubHub and pick them up from one of several stops along a predetermined campus delivery route.

Good Uncle currently has licensing agreements with New York restaurants Croxley’s Ale House, Ess-A-Bagel, Joe’s Pizza, Sticky’s Chicken Fingers, and No. 7 Subs.  Good Uncle founder Wiley Cerilli is an early-stage Seamless employee who later founded SinglePlatform before selling it for $100 million in 2012. Cerilli says Good Uncle’s cooks use the exact same ingredients as the restaurants they license menu items from and train with those outlets’ own cooks so dishes can be replicated as precisely as possible.

Good Uncle sells these meals at college student-friendly price points that range from $7 to $16 per item. And because customers pick up their food at a central pickup point, they pay no delivery fee.

To read more on this subject, click on the web link below:

How to Run a Ghost Kitchen - On the Line | Toast POS (toasttab.com)

Celebrating Women’s History Month

by Bernadette Ventura

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Women have made huge contributions to the culinary and hospitality industry throughout history and what better time than Women’s History Month to honor just a few of them.

Dating back to the 1747 and considered the most influential cookbook of the 1700’s, English cook Hannah Glasse wrote “The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.” The book ran through 40 known editions and by 1805 was published in America.  Glasse is credited with introducing international ingredients and flavors, such as those from India, Germany, Italy and the West Indies.  Quite an accomplishment considering the time period.

Between 1796 and 1822, American Amelia Simmons, wrote “American Cookery,” the first cookbook published in the United States.  American Cookery wrote about food culturally, acknowledging our British heritage, while staking a claim to a new place and new cuisine.  Several common food terms and ingredients today such as, “shortening” originated in Simmons’ book.  American Cookery was once coined as “another declaration of American independence” and was recently designated by the Library of Congress as one of the “Books that Shaped America.”

Perhaps one of the most influential cookbook writers is Fanny Farmer, who invented the recipe writing format that is consistently followed today.  In her book “The Boston Cooking-School Book,” published in 1896, Farmer introduced standardized measuring spoons and cups, and level measurements, replacing arbitrary measurements such as a “piece” or a “teacup.”  This led Farmer to be known as “the mother of level measurements.”  At the age of 30, Farmer enrolled at the Boston Cooking-School, ultimately serving as its Principal in 1891, followed by the 1896 cookbook.  Her later work led to books on diet and nutrition and in addition to lecturing at Harvard Medical School, Farmer taught convalescent diet and nutrition to doctors and nurses.

M.F.K. Fisher wrote about food, or she used food as a metaphor for larger cultural truths. Fisher’s first book “Serve it Forth” was published in 1937, and she said about it, “Look, if you have to eat to live, you may as well enjoy it.” Upon her death, The New York Times called Fisher, “…the writer whose artful personal essays about food created a genre.” Fisher remains the highly respected author of 27 books, hundreds of articles, and was a frequent contributor to The New Yorker.  Have a read here.

In her 1945 Chinese cookbook, “How to Cook and Eat in Chinese,” Buwei Yang Chao, coined the terms “stir-fry” and “pot stickers”.  Buwei didn’t speak much English but forever influenced the way Chinese food is viewed in the US, moving it beyond the previously limited view of Americans trying to understand the cuisine and helping it become popular. 

Edna Lewis, known as the Grande Dame of Southern Cooking, opened Café Nicholson in 1949 on the east side of Manhattan.  A pioneer for black women in the field, Lewis became a lecturer for the American Museum of Natural History and in 1972 wrote “The Edna Lewis Cookbook.”

We all know Julia Child and her influence remains endless.  Perhaps she is most famous for her book, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” published in 1961, and “The French Chef,” her television show that launched in 1963.  Julia studied at Le Cordon Bleu and in 1949 was the only woman in her first class. Child won multiple awards throughout her career including a Peabody and 3 Emmys.  In 1993, she was the first woman inducted into the Culinary Institute of America’s Hall of Fame.  Today, Julia’s home kitchen and tools can be seen the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.  Bon Appetit!

Pioneering restaurateur Ruth Fertel bought a New Orleans restaurant called Chris Steak House in 1965.  By adding her first name in the possessive, TADA! Ruth’s Chris Steak House was founded.  Fertel was a single mother and self-taught in all aspects of the restaurant business.  From humble beginnings, Fertel created one of the largest international chains we know today.

Farm to Table is a concept and practice we know well today and in 1971, it was Alice Waters that brought the idea to life when she opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley, CA. From the beginning, she insisted on ingredients that were local, organic and sustainably grown.  Alice is the founder of “The Edible Schoolyard Project,” which teaches sustainable food education to children in 57 countries.  In 2015, President Obama awarded Waters with the National Humanities Medal.

Over the next 50 years, women have continued to grow and influence the culinary and hospitality arenas.  To cite just a few:

 Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken were the first female chefs on the Las Vegas strip when in 1999 they opened their popular LA Mexican restaurant, Border Grill;

In 2005 Cristeta Comerford became the first White House Executive Chef.  Comerford grew up in Manilla where she started her career in fine dining followed by training and cooking internationally.  After serving as Sous Chef for 10 years, Laura Bush promoted Comerford into The White House lead position;

In 2008, Stephanie Izard was awarded the coveted title of Iron Chef after winning season 1 of Iron Chef Gauntlet. Izard went on to receive Food & Wine’s Best New Chef designation in 2011 and in in 2013 won a James Beard award for Best Chef: Great Lakes.  Izard is the founder of Chicago restaurants Girl & the Goat, Little Goat, Duck, Duck Goat and Cabra, all in Chicago;

Nancy Silverton, founder of restaurants Osteria Mozza, Pizzeria Mozza and Chi Spacca, was the first female chef to win a James Beard Award for Outstanding Pasty Chef in 2014;

Nina Compton was designated Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs of 2017 and in 2018, was the first black woman to win a James Beard award for Best Chef: South.  A Culinary Institute of America graduate, Compton started her career at Daniel a 3-star Michelin rated restaurant in NY before founding her own restaurants, Compere Lapin and Bywater American Bistro in New Orleans.

The list of accomplished women in culinary and hospitality field could go on for pages so let’s just say, “thank you” to all the women that have broken down barriers and smashed ceilings.  You have made the hospitality industry proud and serve as talented and accomplished role models for our youth.