Ken Deneau: on a huge foodservice playing field, this 'coach' makes sure that his team is warmed up and ready for the day's work

Nation's Restaurant News, Jan 26, 2004 by Paul King

Most general managers don't have the opportunity to create new concepts, given their unit-oriented responsibilities away from the movers and shakers at corporate headquarters. Ken Deneau is not one of those managers.

Seventeen years ago, Deneau was fortunate enough to land a job at Michigan State University, the East Lansing institution whose foodservice department is as large--$36 million--as some restaurant companies. Recognized by his superiors for his ability to organize and plan, he has been given the opportunity on two occasions to take MSU's foodservice department to higher levels by helping to create the convenience stores and then the coffee bars that he now manages.

Today Deneau manages 20 operations on the 53,000-student campus: 14 convenience stores, four coffee bars, a food court and a movie theater concession stand. Combined they account for $5 million in annual sales.

"It has been quite an experience," Deneau says. "We've built a brand--Sparty's--that is very recognizable on campus. I'm proud of the brand. The c-stores satisfy 9,000 customers a day and are fiscally sound. The coffeehouses have been very successful, and we're planning more of them."

How successful? The first and largest coffee bar, located in MSU's main library, does $500,000 worth of business a year.

Deneau, a graduate of MSU's hotel, restaurant and institution management program, caught the foodservice bug like many people, working part-time jobs in a variety of restaurants and discovering that he enjoyed the business.

"I moved through a tour of duty, starting at the age of 15, doing mostly cooking," he says. "I worked fast food, family, fine dining, country club, hotel and campus dining. Each job kind of threw another log on the fire, and I came to Michigan State for the hospitality business program. Going to school and working in the business was good, because one kind of reinforced the other."

After graduating, Deneau landed a job with Levy Restaurants in Chicago. He spent a little more than a year with Levy, working at the Ravinia Music Festival, where Levy manages dining and concessions, and the Chestnut Street Grill in Water Tower Place.

Then he returned to East Lansing to get married and earn an M.B.A. In the process he returned to foodservice, where he had worked as an undergraduate student.

"I started as a supervisor at Akers Hall," he says. "It was a new experience for me because it was a big operation. We were pushing 1,000 people through at lunch, 800 at dinner.

"Standard restaurant kitchen work is not based on the level of production you find in a college campus operation," Deneau explains. There are three or four distinct meal periods, and you have to be ready for them. A restaurant has only one or two meal periods, and the traffic flow isn't as crazy."

In 1990, when Michael Rice was the manager of Brody Hall, he hired Deneau as night manager. The night manager, a position that since has been eliminated, ran the residence hall's snack bar. Rice now is director of auxiliary services for MSU.

"That was a desirable shift for my part," Deneau says. "I was used to it from restaurants, and it worked out well with a new family."

The snack bar was designed to satisfy the cravings of students after the dinner hour. The unwritten rule was that the snack bar didn't offer items available on the regular dinner menu.

"I noticed that students' eating habits were changing," he recalls. "As our menus changed to please students, items being sold in the snack bar were now finding their way into the cafeteria, and snack bar sales declined. I suggested that we begin offering more packaged goods, snacks and grab-and-go items."

Rice allowed Deneau to experiment with ideas that in time would become Sparty's convenience store. When Rice took over as foodservice coordinator for the retiring Ted Smith in 1993, he made Deneau the first convenience store manager and began the conversion of snack bars into Sparty's.

By 1995 there were eight Sparty's. In 1998, when Rice became director of auxiliary services, he converted five more snack bars and opened a new, 14th unit. He also made Deneau his general manager for Sparty's.

In 1999 Rice and Deneau hooked up with Cliff Haka, the director of the MSU library, and created a plan to open a coffeehouse.

"Cliff Haka came to us and said he had noticed all of the bookstore chains opening cafes," Deneau recalls. "Up to that time food was forbidden in libraries, but Cliff was a newer library director and he wanted to change that."

So the first Cyber Car6 was opened, a 6,500-square-foot unit on the first floor of the library. Jim Hensley, assistant library director, said the coffee bar has exceeded all expectations.

"Ken is very professional and knowledgeable, and that has helped make the Cyber Cafe very successful," Hensley says. "Ken is a great listener, and he addresses problems and concerns quickly and effectively."

At present there are four coffee bars spread across campus, and Deneau and Rice are talking about building a fifth in the MSU Union, where a five-unit food court currently stands.