Sodexho

Asian Street Food salad bowl promotion puts check averages in the fast lane

Asian Street Food turned around a typically slow month for Sodexho's Rio Café in Gaithersburg, Md., according to general manager, Austin Isemann. He had plenty of reasons to like last August's salad bowl concept from Sodexho's Trend Trackers limited-time-offer promotion program.

"Although August is typically one of our most difficult months to manage financially, we still hit several marks," Isemann adds. "On the days we featured Asian Street Food, participation increased 12 percent from the previous four weeks, and our check average jumped over 5 percent for the day."

Rio Café is the corporate dining room in the multitenant building where Sodexho has its headquarters. It is one of about 2,100 subscribers to the company's quarterly Trend Trackers program.

"Trend Trackers is what it says; we track trends," explains Frank Ruffino, Sodexho's corporate executive chef.

Asian was a trend that appealed to Ruffino and the culinary and marketing teams. They weren't the only ones who liked it.

"We got lots of great feedback with Asian Street Food," he adds.

What the Sodexho professionals created was an easy-to-build, five-step Asian noodle salad bowl with a bed of chopped romaine, followed by rice or noodle salad, chicken skewers with a glaze, prepared garnishes and dressing or dipping sauces.

Each of those steps offered at least seven options for customers to explore, many of them featuring Chinese, Japanese, Thai or Vietnamese ingredients. For example, the skewer selections included sweet-and-sour chicken, hoisin barbecue chicken, Thai peanut chicken and Thai sweet chili chicken.

Trend Trackers' information, including point-of-sale material and recipes with photos, goes out quarterly on CD to all unit managers at the subscriber accounts. It contains approximately 10 new recipes every month, or about 30 a quarter.

That's a lot of concepts every three months, and it keeps the culinary and marketing teams hopping.

Wendy Jean Bennett, Sodexho's senior director of marketing strategy, says the program is used primarily by three of the company's divisions — campus services, corporate services and health care.

Ruffino, Bennett and their teams often generate ideas for Trend Tracker promotions by keeping close tabs on trends in foodservice. They also receive input from Sodexho's business lines and the company's vendors.

"We do a focus group yearly to see what we're going to do, but once that's done, we get these out pretty quickly," Bennett says.

"We all like Asian, and I've wanted to do something with Asian street food," Ruffino explains. With that settled, the chef and his team came into the kitchen and, as he says, "we developed something out in a week or two."

Discussing the development of Asian Street Food, Lisa Simenauer, the research and development chef, says, "A lot of the divisions wanted to see really clean food, but they also wanted a sampling of more Pan Asian things rather than anything really traditionally Chinese or Japanese."

Although she had a general knowledge of Asian food, Simenauer explains, "I didn't have enough to develop flavor profiles, because it is such a unique cuisine, and we wanted to make it as authentic as possible. I had carte blanche to buy all these cookbooks. It was fantastic."

While authenticity within Sodexho's national distribution chain was one of the goals with Asian Street Food, another key consideration was to fit all the promotions into Sodexho's "Wellness and You" program.

Asian Street Food did that by offering no extra fat as well as healthful ingredients like crisp greens, noodle salad and chicken skewers.

With so many new recipes required every quarter, there's plenty of room under Trend Trackers for innovative concepts that can lead to long hours.

"It's hectic, to say the least," adds Ruffino, a man who knows the highs and lows of the restaurant business all too well.

In 1978 he and his wife purchased a restaurant, the Pirate's Galley, in Sarasota, Fla. His first kitchen chef quit after a week, though, which pressed Ruffino into back-of-the-house duties. It was a revelation, and Ruffino says: "I found that I craved working in the kitchen. It was like I was born to be there."

Unfortunately, the restaurant business in Sarasota was very seasonal, leaving Ruffino with good reviews but too few customers. He fought on for four years before moving to Chicago and then back to Florida, working in several eateries along the way.

In 1991 he changed directions and took a job as a sous chef at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

"When I saw an ad for that job, I didn't even realize they did food there," he confesses. "I never realized there was a contract side of the business."

His initial job interview was an eye-opener.

"The chef said, 'Well, summers are real slow. We're home on Thanksgiving and Easter, and we get two weeks at Christmas.' "

Ruffino couldn't believe what he was hearing. "I had always worked on Christmas and Thanksgiving," he says.

Needless to say, he's been on the contract side ever since. "I really love staying on top of trends and developing things," he says. "We have lots of room to innovate at Sodexho, and we have a great team. We get paid for having fun."