First Real Day.

Hello Everyone!

Today was our first day on the job, apart from the orientation and getting all our paperwork situated. We are now officially employees with UCONN dining services!

This morning we first had our welcome reception at the restaurant, Chuck & Augie's here at UCONN. We had the opportunity to meet a lot of the managers, assistant managers, and other dining services staff, and sample the delicious spread of fresh fruit and pastries provided by the bakery on campus, as well as the staff of the restaurant. Everyone was enthusiastic and eager to work with us, and provide many new opportunities for us. We both are looking forward to the many projects that await us in the future!

Next, we had the opportunity to have a meeting with Dennis Pierce, the Director of Dining Services to go over the history of the dining services here at the University of Connecticut, as well as what we can expect at the NACUFS National Conference in Boston, that we are anxious to attend in July. It is a great opportunity to learn a lot of valuable information and be able to network with the thousands of people attending from across the country. This is also the first time Laura will be visiting the Boston area, which leaves plenty of opportunities to explore.

We also had the chance to tour the dish room here at the South dining hall. Despite being a dish room, the operation of it was interesting to learn about. The machinery is able to grind, cook, and dry all of the compost able material leftover on meal trays, and use it in composting at the farms located on campus. It was cool to learn how sustainable the food operations are, especially since they can serve up to 15,000 in one day! That's a lot of compost!

Working in the dish room

The Hydra-extractor! 

Before....

After!

Our last task was to accompany David Barbera (a.k.a Mr. Sir) with forecasting meals using the FoodPro system. This is used to predict how many servings of each food item to prepare in future meals using data collected from last year as well as how many people are predicted to be served. This task was a bit daunting at first, but after a bit of practice it was a lot easier. We will have the opportunity to use this system again when we will develop our themed meal to serve to incoming freshmen students during orientation.

Laura hard at work on FoodPro!

Stay tuned to find out more about our meal and projects to come...

Hope everyone else is enjoying their internships and having plenty of experiences as we are!