Diversity, technology issues top agenda at FENI confab

Nation's Restaurant News,  Feb 21, 2000  by Karyn Strauss

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LAS VEGAS -- Canvassing topics as broad-ranging as workforce diversity, technology and the future of the culinary-arts curriculum, several hundred hospitality educators convened here to attend the second annual Foodservice Educators Network International summit.

Themed "The Culinary Classroom 2005," the day-long confab offered a combination of industry keynote presentations and cooking demonstrations.

The conference's opening speaker, Gerry Fernandez, president of the Multicultural Foodservice & Hospitality Alliance, said the industry must promote and leverage ethnic diversity in the workplace as well as in the classroom.

The restaurant industry also needs to trumpet itself as a career of choice, rather than its perception as a "dead end." That message should be spread across all races, he stressed, proffering statistics about the growing influence minority groups have in today's marketplace.

Minority perception of foodservice, he explained, "is the low-level, burger-flipping jobs. We need to send the message of ownership," he said, adding that "educators have the same responsibility as corporate America."

Fernandez also spoke to the significant purchasing power of these rapidly growing minority populations, adding that with that power comes a great marketing opportunity, which the restaurant industry needs to utilize.

"There are 27 million Hispanics with $365 billion worth of purchasing power and a 45-percent growth rate, and they are the fastest-growing group of homeowners in the United States. There are 34 million African-Americans with a 16-percent growth rate and a $400 billion market. And Asian-Americans represent the fastest-growing population in the United States," Fernandez explained. "That's a clear marketing opportunity."

Summit attendees then switched gears to get a technology update from Bill McDowell, who is managing editor of FoodserviceCentral.com., an online food-industry resource center. Although McDowell admitted that the foodservice Internet is still in its infancy, he offered ways the Web may prove to be a useful tool for operators and educators.

"Business to business e-commerce is expected to reach $7.3 trillion by 2004," he said. "Fifty-five percent of operators are expected to place orders on-line in the next two years. Seventy percent of training costs are logistical -- simply getting to a facility, printed materials, food, etc. And 40 percent of people seeking secondary degrees are over 40 years old."

McDowell cited Brinker International, the Dallas-based, multiconcept casual operator, as an example of the ways in which the Web can help lower cost of doing business. McDowell said Brinker has a decentralized purchasing system that allows for each unit essentially to use any vendors it chooses. The result is that Brinker's concepts deal with "more than 30,000 vendors annually - and 45 new vendors a day," he said. This year Brinker's corporate headquarters has mandated that all that business be moved online to save in logistical costs of processing all that paper. The company expects to save $1 million by switching to on-line business transactions, he said.

As a training tool, the Internet also can save significant costs in printing training manuals and paying for new employees to attend training sessions. It also can accommodate different learning styles or language barriers as trainees can proceed through the materials at their own rates, he said.

On the subject of retention, on-line training tools could allow self-motivated employees to gain the additional knowledge they may need to advance to a higher position in a company, McDowell added.

And while many operations now use CD-ROM training materials for such subjects as food safety, proper handling and cleaning procedures and back-of-the-house skills like accounting and inventory management, as technology progresses, those materials are at risk for becoming outdated quickly. McDowell estimated that as Web technology advances, on-line demonstration videos could solve out-of-date dilemmas.

Although much culinary education demands in-person training, distance learning through the Internet easily could complement in-classroom instruction, he said. Guest lectures, reinforcement of reading materials and pretesting activities all can get integrated into a class curriculum via the Web.

"School will become something you do, not somewhere you go," McDowell said. "Beyond lectures students could have the ability to interact and collaborate with each other through e-mail, bulletin boards and chat rooms."

Distance learning, he said, is most effective for industries that have a geographically dispersed workforce, training cost constraints and jobs that require employees to adapt and change quickly and have high turnover rates.

McDowell also discussed how operators are beginning to leverage the Internet as a marketing tool. From on-line reservation systems to takeout delivery services to auction services where customers can "bid" on discounted prices, the World Wide Web has the ability to reach more people, more quickly than any other traditional marketing tool can, he said. In a recent survey McDowell added that "Americans rated AOL higher than network television stations ABC, CBS, NBC combined" in terms of relevance in today's world: