Power Emotions
The success of an interaction strategy in your program’s retail operations, which likely double as practical classrooms, has everything to do with the quality of interaction.

I describe customer perceptions, all expressed by a single word, that are the fulcrum of your operational success with action stations, serving lines and full service. I call them “emotions” here, but they are actually perceptions on the part of the customer in reaction to his or her experience at your operation—one that can elicit strong emotional response. The objective is to provoke a favorable emotional response.

FRESH.Just say this word to yourself. It’s a beautiful-sounding word. It’s almost akin to onomatopoeia, when words stand in for sounds or feelings. Like “brrrr” to express being cold. “Fresh” is a perception that carries strong emotional feeling.

A few years ago some science was published that the muscles in your face are connected to neurons in your brain. It’s the reason that, when you’re happy you grin or smile, and when you’re sad you frown. The revelation behind the science is that the reverse effect is also achievable. In other words, if you’re feeling a little blue or down, force a smile. That upward pull on the muscles at the corners of your mouth triggers the brain to release endorphins, which makes you feel good.

The perception of “fresh” has that same power in people when it’s used as part of an interaction strategy. For example, Kendall maintains an organic garden on campus, and has a very strong relationship with Green City Market, which is Chicago’s only year-round farmer’s market. The critical importance of fresh food at Kendall College is communicated to all students, faculty and staff in Kendall’s four schools (Culinary, Hospitality Management, Business and Education), and action stations and à la minute cooking, as well as an open-kitchen floor plan, help to communicate the importance of working with and serving fresh foods.

Indeed, “fresh”—whether we’re discussing the quality of food, the mood expressed by the dining environment or the clean, starched cotton of a white chef’s jacket—is absolutely a power arrow in your customer-satisfaction quiver. Think of your culinary students serving from your action stations and lines, as well as executing their front-of-house training and engaging with guests, as your Ambassadors of Fresh.

TRUST.Trust is part of value, and one of the biggest trends in foodservice. A few years ago, www.foodchannel.com, based on research conducted in conjunction with CultureWaves®, listed food vetting among its top 10 food trends. What’s leading this trend is our constant need for assurance that we are eating the right things, that our food is safe, that we are not ingesting pesticides or anything that will someday prove harmful. The issue is that people are asking where their food comes from.

Meanwhile, the New York-based Joseph Baum & Michael Whiteman Company, which creates high-profile restaurants around the world for hotels, restaurant companies, major museums and other consumer destinations, identified 13 food and dining trends, concluding that fresh = local = handmade = safer = better. People are looking for edibles they can trust, and for food communities that stand personally behind their products.

If I’m a customer at your action station, line or white-tablecloth-draped four-top, there’s an inherent trust on my part in the individual who’s assembling my tossed salad, either to order or tableside. I trust those ingredients to be wholesome and fresh, and when I see them for myself, I believe they are. I trust them to be safe for me, and when I routinely see the same people putting ingredients together over several visits, I trust they are. I can see that food is being assembled for me by real human beings who, like me, have the same concerns that their food is fresh and safe.

MYSTERY.I call this perception the good, the bad and the ugly, because mystery in your operation can either be very titillating for the customer or very scary.

A good example of strategically employing the power emotion of mystery is Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, which has been voted to have the best campus food in the nation several times in The Princeton Review. When incoming students are asked why they chose Virginia Tech, the No. 1 response is the food!

In the old days, foodservice on campus was just fuel, and sometimes a customer was happy with his meal and sometimes he wasn’t. But about 25 years ago that began to change, and suddenly student dining became an important amenity beyond the military model of three squares a day that characterized the efficiency model of foodservice on campuses.

Today, students are choosing colleges based on things in addition to academics, and food facilities are extremely important in attracting and retaining students. So Virginia Tech, as many other colleges and universities have done, became market-driven and started to view students as customers. At the same time, parents were demanding better food and more choices for their children, and were willing to pay for it.

Virginia Tech’s challenge was providing freshly prepared, interesting, exciting food for customers that rivaled restaurant food. Its answer was an à la carte-style meal plan that includes a lot of exhibition-style options. Before, when food was cooked in back, a student went through the line and didn’t know where the food came from, didn’t know if it was cooked yesterday or today, and it was known as the “mystery behind the wall.” Exhibition cooking removed that mystery. There’s no question about how fresh it is.

To achieve that, every à la carte facility has at least a mini kitchen, not merely a panini press. The very popular West End Market on campus, for instance, offers a wood-fired pizza oven, and split hickory is stored on the back dock. The Asian station is a full Asian kitchen completely open to view, with no more woks hidden behind walls.

Virginia Tech essentially removed the mystery from food production, transforming the old efficiency model of foodservice to a service model. This means not having Reubens already prepared for sale as is, but assembled to order—which can result in leaving out the sandwich’s defining sauerkraut upon request. That service model means customization at all hours of the day at every opportunity.

Indeed, exhibition cooking, made-to-order action stations and tableside assembly promote the other, “good” side of mystery. Like any culinary demonstration, watching a foodservice professional or student take several ingredients and employ proper cooking and plating procedures to transform them into an attractive, flavorful dish creates a pleasing mystery for the guest who can witness for him or herself the delightful “alchemy” of cooking.

OWNERSHIP.This is a perception with particularly high emotional equivalent in the economic times we recently found ourselves in. So many people lost valuable things they’d once owned, like jobs and homes, and virtually everyone knows someone who has lost one, the other or both. In your operations, the perception of ownership is communicated by letting me have it my way.

But, simply having it my way isn’t enough to ensure a successful interaction that results in repeat business. Although you might serve me a dish customized to my stated preference, I still want that personal interaction. I still want that connection with that individual making it my way.

I spoke with Kevin Schrimmer, a chef instructor in Kendall’s Café, which is a cafeteria-style setting that doubles as a practical classroom. Chef Schrimmer also works with students in Kendall’s quick-service restaurant, which gives students another level of training. In both outlets, action stations are prevalent, particularly in the areas of Asian noodle stations, Mexican fare like burritos, quesadillas and nachos, seafood stations that focus on techniques such as poaching, and à la minute desserts and sandwiches.

The goal is to expose both culinary students and guests to as many different kinds of things as possible and create opportunities for students to learn how to best interact with guests to create a valuable experience. Because guests so often happen to be the students that a culinary student will sit next to in another class or might be an instructor that that student cook is learning from, there’s already a built-in familiarity with guests, which facilitates comfort and ease of interaction. This allows for a great deal of customer feedback and measuring the success of experience delivery.

One of Chef Schrimmer’s biggest tasks is to teach culinary students how to maximize communication and flow so that food is cooked correctly, quickly and appealingly. Students are taught how to play off each other so that foods that take longer to cook fire up first, while other students execute remaining parts of the order. Thus, by the time the guest is at the end of the line, that shrimp or risotto will be ready. It’s a real-life exercise in the importance of listening carefully, both to the guest and each other. To make it all work, student cooks are encouraged to talk to customers, describe what’s being served that day, talk about potential allergens, where the food that day is sourced from, what’s unique about the dish being served, etc., as a way to engage interactive learning.

Action stations on the line and floating also provide an opportunity to teach station cleanliness and sanitation, food safety, proper equipment usage, marketing through signage and merchandizing, and the importance of proper lighting.

I hope you have enjoyed reading my series in “The Gold Medal Classroom” on teaching and implementing an interaction strategy in your classrooms and student-run foodservice outlets. If you have any questions about Kendall’s success or merely would like to discuss the new “interaction economy” that’s beginning to take root in American society, please feel free to e-mail me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. More information on the School of Culinary Arts at Kendall College is available at www.kendall.edu.

Renee Zonka, RD, CEC, CHE, MBA, is the dean of the Kendall College School of Culinary Arts in Chicago.