Week One at Purdue!

Hi All! Wow, time is flying by this summer... Already one week down and still so much to learn!

My name is Susan Berkman and I'm participating in the NACUFS Foodservice Management Internship at Purdue University with Brittany Ellis. We arrived in West Lafayette last Sunday to move into our apartments on campus, then met at the Director of the program's house for a barbeque with many of the people who work in the Foodservice department at Purdue. The food was delicious and I finally got to experience some Mid-Western hospitality that I was looking forward to! Brittany and I have come from opposite ends of the country to participate in this internship- she's from New York and I'm from California- and we've both been loving the campus so far!

To start off this week, we met with our Coordinator, Mary Ann, to go through orientation. We walked to the different Dining Halls on campus and toured their facilities to understand where we would be working during the summer and stopped into the Food Stores building, which is where we spent our next two days. After this, we watched various safety videos for new hires, including ones on handwashing, BBP and PPE. We also watched a video on Sustainability, which was made by the interns last summer and is now shown to all new hires! Mary Ann hinted that she would like us to make something similar for our final project, so Brittany and I will need get started on thinking up some ideas within the next few weeks.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, we worked in the Food Stores building on campus, which places orders for all the food supplied to the Dining Courts, processes the food, and stores it in their warehouse. We were able to help in the meat processing room for one of the days, and it amazed me how much Purdue's facilities can do. They make all of their own marinades and mix their own spices in house to flavor the meat, and produce very little waste. For example, if they have scraps of meat left over from slicing a pork butt, they are able to use it to make sausage (which we were able to witness). We also got some great experience in this building learning about CBORD in regards to placing orders, purchasing, forecasting, and requisitions. On our second day at Food Stores, we were able to learn all about the warehouse, and after filling the orders placed, we were able to go on the runs to deliver the food to the Dining Courts. After this, we learned all about the vending machines on campus and how their operations work, then learned about how they deal with taking inventory in the facility and how they price their food to their clients. We were also lucky enough to partake in some food testing, which was very interesting, and we learned about what makes a quality product and what does not.

I really enjoyed my time in Food Stores because I was able to see how big of a role this small building plays in feeding all of the students on campus, and I realized how important each and every job accomplished in that building was to the success of the whole operation. The people in Food Stores are great and they deserve a lot of recognition! (They also provided us with flowers and a Certification of Achievement after our time there, which caught both Brittany and I off guard!)

On Thursday and Friday we started work at the Dining Hall we will primarily be working with during our time here: Earhart Dining Court. I started out in the Dishwashing room, which was way more interesting than it sounds! I learned about all of the work that goes into the job, and was able to experience the lunchtime rush and how quickly the dirty dishes pile up! I also learned all about how the gigantic dish washing machine works and what solutions are needed to sanitize the dishes, along with the temperatures that the water needed to reach before any cleaning could take place. On our next day, I learned all about receiving orders and storekeeping from the Dining Court's perspective. We filled requisitions from the kitchen to supply them with the food they needed to begin cooking, and made sure to keep their supplies constantly filled for the most used items, such as flour, salt, and sugar. Since this facility was not built large enough to fulfill it's demand (3,000 meals a day during the school year, which is only 30% of the campus's demand!) I learned about having to rotate the stock to keep the oldest items being used first to reduce spoilage.

I've loved my time at Earhart so far! It's great spending time with the students who work there, and I've made some great connections with the people I've been shadowing. Next week we will be back at Earhart to learn about cold and hot prep, and we'll spend some days working in the pastry station and at the grill!

More updates next week! I hope everyone has a great rest of their weekend!!

- Susan