Aramark

Foodservice management firm’s Club Fast-Track keeps customers up on the latest food trends

Seeing a need and filling it is what Aramark is doing with its Club Fast-Track promotions.

Under the Club Fast-Track umbrella, Aramark’s Culinary Solutions team churns out 18 promotions a year. “They’re released as three-week promotions, but customers can keep it going, if it’s working,” says Paul Carr, director of culinary programs.

Carr’s boss, Doug Martinides, planted the seed. “He kind of had this idea going around in his head for a while and finally said, ‘Wouldn’t this be a neat thing to do?’ ” Carr recalls.

“Limited-time offers give consumers a sense of urgency,” Carr adds. “We didn’t have anything like that in our portfolio. We wanted to create a series of offers that drove a food theme as opposed to a holiday theme.”

Turning the idea into reality fell to Carr and his departmental partner, Lynne Sundblad, the director of marketing. Today Philadelphia-based Aramark has 1,250 operations that subscribe to Club Fast-Track. Among recent promotions that have scored well with customers are breakfast Scone Sticks, Dip ‘n Chick’n snacks and Hearty Meals in Tasty Bowls. Among recent promotions that have scored well with customers are breakfast Scone Sticks, Dip ‘n Chick’n snacks and Hearty Meals in Tasty Bowls.

“What we do is look for a trend,” says Carr. “For example, we looked at our portfolio and saw that we really hadn’t done much for breakfast. We knew that grab-and-go items were hot and that scones were becoming very popular.”

After traveling around and seeing what others were offering, Carr thought, “Scones are neat, but let’s make them a little more hand-held so people can eat them on the run.”

Snacks were another category where Carr and Sundblad felt Aramark’s cupboard was a tad bare. “Research told us that people are eating more times a day, so they’re looking to snack more,” he says. “People also love to dip food into dipping sauces so that’s where Dip ‘n Chick’n came from.”

Giving Dip ‘n Chick’n a twist, Aramark Culinary Solutions accompanied it with 10 slightly offbeat dipping sauces, including a Jamaican barbecue sauce and a sweet chili sauce with cilantro and garlic.

A third promotion that helped Aramark win its MenuMasters Award was Hearty Meals in Tasty Bowls. “The bowl is the story here,” Carr explains. “It’s made from pizza dough that’s marinated overnight and baked in the oven. It’s a unique carrier. You can enjoy your meal and then eat the bowl.” It’s a unique carrier. You can enjoy your meal and then eat the bowl.”

“Lynne and I co-manage the department,” Carr says. The group consists of six people. Besides Carr and Sundblad, there’s a chef, a concept development manager, an office manager and an administrative staff member.

Adds Sundblad: “Paul and I decide on a promotion strategy together. I look at the consumer trends; he does the food trends. Then he creates the recipes that fit our strategies. I work with the creative teams — ad agencies and photographers — to ensure that what we’re communicating is true to the strategy.”

Carr grew up in a seacoast town in New Jersey and graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in 1985. He worked for several years as a sous chef in fine-dining restaurants before joining Aramark. He made the switch because he had a young child and wanted weekends and holidays off.

Sundblad came to Aramark in 1999 straight from Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration in Ithaca, N.Y. But she was hardly “fresh out of school.”

After graduating in 1992 from Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., she worked for an ad agency and then supervised the dining room staff at the Lafayette restaurant in the Hays-Adams Hotel in Washington, D.C. From 1995 to 1997, she was an operations-marketing manager with Compass Group’s Eurest Dining Services.

“At that point in time,” she says, “I put my career on hold for two years and moved to Ithaca to attend Cornell.”

A resident of downtown Philadelphia, Sundblad thrives on the creativity and entrepreneurial aspects of her job. While “entrepreneurial” may seem out of context in a corporation the size of Aramark, Sundblad points out, “We’re kind of a standalone department.; We fund ourselves, which gives us a chance to think outside the box and to create business solutions that make sense.”

Carr’s favorite part of the job is developing menu strategies. “Right now,” he says, “we’re looking at doing a boneless wing. We tend to look at what casual-theme [operators are] doing because most of our customers are casual-theme customers. The test is, ‘How can we do that effectively and put a twist on it?’ ”

Whatever twists Carr and Sundblad are using, they appear to be working. Club Fast-Track is getting rave notices from the field.

“It’s an awesome program,” says Kansas City, Mo.-based Dana Shreeve, Aramark’s director of marketing for a seven-state region. “It gives us a terrific opportunity to increase guest and client satisfaction and increase profitability.”

On a quarterly basis clients get large, colorful point-of-sale posters plus CDs, which describe everything about the promotion, including recipes, price points, how to merchandise the items and how to cook them.

“They’ve made Club Fast-Track so easy for operators to implement that it’s a no-brainer,” Shreeve adds.