Kendall Hazel | Assistant News Co-Editor
Ken Allen is much more than just a smiling face hustling around the servery and dining halls of Buena Vista University. Typically, Ken is seen rushing from station to station checking food quality, crafting wraps and sandwiches, or working in the kitchen preparing the next set of entrées. What people don’t see is the General Manager’s office tucked into the back corner of the servery littered with notepads, sticky notes, and memos. This is where Ken Allen works tirelessly for one goal: “simple satisfaction.”
Since the start of the January interim at BVU, Allen and his team set forth an action plan to increase the overall satisfaction of BVU students.
“We created a calendar from January all the way to May. We call that our promotion calendar which is actually just a list of all the national events we are trying to focus on and all the normal stuff we do: steak night, wing night, marquee brunch, moonlight breakfast. We look at that calendar and think about what else we can add to try to add more ‘in your face’ type stuff” Allen said.
To Allen, this “in your face” stuff is not only important for student satisfaction, but it is a great way to provide variety for the students while staying consistent with popular U.S culture.
“We had ‘Fat Tuesday’ lunch, and our whole lunch theme was based on the taste of Louisiana and New Orleans. Since J-term (January interim), we have had National Hot Pastrami Sandwich Day, National Popcorn Day, National Chocolate Cake Day, National Blueberry Pancake Day…,” Allen said.
Recently, corporate challenged Allen to host a “Swipe Plus” event. These kinds of events include steak nights, wing nights, and marquee brunch in which students swipe their cards and get the normal all-you-can-eat dining, but in addition, students would have to pay $5 to $7 more just to have the luxury of the steak, wings, or marquee brunch.
This idea was all started in an attempt to create excitement and intrigue for a fun dining experience. What students do not realize is these events are already graciously provided in our normal meal plan, thanks to Allen.
“Most campuses don’t do a steak night like we do, most campuses don’t do a wing night like we do, and most campuses don’t do marquee brunch like we do. Those three events right there already set us above the average campus in featured events” Allen said.
Ultimately, Sodexo is promoting something that would typically cost BVU students more money, but thanks to Ken Allen and his forward thinking, BVU already enjoys the highly anticipated steak nights, wing nights, and marquee brunch without any further cost.
Allen did not stop there. In response to Super Bowl 50, he did create a Swipe Plus event called “Wicked Wings.” Corporate’s idea was for this event to be exclusive and the students would have to eat the wings in the dining hall. Once again, Allen took the students’ interests into mind:
“I don’t want to do a wing night where it’s limiting my students from going to it or not. So, I’m trying to appease both worlds [student and corporate] because I have corporate saying I need to do this Swipe Plus event, and I have to respond to them with my results. It’s an expectation from my boss to facilitate these events. So, what we did then was give wings to everybody, and the ‘plus’ piece we did was allow students to take them to go—take them to your room and have a further Super Bowl party.”
It is abundantly clear that Allen and the Sodexo staff strive to give students plenty of food options, the best quality, and dependable consistency. Allen often goes out of his way to do something special for this campus that not many other campuses experience. They do their best to make this possible, but in the end, they rely heavily on the feedback of the student population. Allen explained how the surveys conducted by Sodexo are so important:
“In the surveys, they [students] hammer on three things: more variety, more consistency, and better quality. What is tough in our world, in an all-you-can-eat format for the budget dollars we have to work with, we try to do the best we can in putting a quality product out there,” Allen said. He and his team put their heads together to come up with fresh ideas following each survey.
“In response to the surveys, in December while students were gone on Christmas Break, we put together an action plan as a team to focus on daily menus and having a good, consistent variety.”
Allen went on to explain how the kitchen operates behind the scenes. From looking at detailed history for past meals all the way to preparing back-up meals if a certain entrée seems to be popular on a given night, Allen finds a way for him and his 65 employees to be prepared for anything.
Of those employees, Allen had nothing but praise for his coworker: Production and Food Service Manager Nate Blum:
“Nate takes the corporate menu that is handed down from executive chefs and works with that… he does my ordering. I assist him with receiving… he tracks our counts [of product], he tracks labor, plans labor, facilitates unit safety, so there are not a lot of things he doesn’t have his hands in. He is one of those ‘jack of all trades,’ and a good guy,” Allen said.
Blum is also very involved with the results of the surveys. He receives the meal plan and does what he can to tweak the menu to adhere to the students desires. He does all this while still following codes and regulations.
Allen had nothing but positive things to say about his employees like Nate Blum and Executive Chef Michelle Patten, but his employees return the same praise for Allen. Junior Spanish Major at BVU Patricia Schwartz works for Sodexo, and she said it all:
“Being around Ken definitely makes you feel like you aren’t working hard enough because he is there from 5:00 in the morning until 5:00 at night or even later. There was one day he went to the hospital and still came to work right afterwards even though the doctor said he wasn’t allowed to work. He is always there. He always has a good attitude. Even if it is a bad day, he has a good attitude. He is always coming and doing work, and he never yells at people for not doing work—he just does it for them. He never complains,” Schwartz said.
Schwartz made it clear that Allen cares about his employees on a deep level.
“He asks if anything is wrong, and if you look like you haven’t eaten all day and the servery is closed, he will make something and bring it to you. He has done that for me before, like I didn’t like anything on the menu one night, and he went down and made me my grilled cheese because he knows I love grilled cheese… He is so willing to go out of his way for everybody,” Schwartz added.
In the end, Allen, Blum, and so many others work extremely hard to provide quality food and a good dining experience. The surveys are a great way to hear feedback, but Allen has recently taken it upon himself to reach out personally:
“As I journey, I have put myself out into the dining hall more, making rounds, trying to catch tables. I’m not out there to bother them. I will ask, ‘How’s lunch?’ ‘Get enough to eat?’ My true message at this point is ‘don’t give me bullshit.’ If something sucks, I want to know. Because then I can go to back to the kitchen and find out where we fell… it takes a lot of people to find out if we missed something,” Allen said.
Ken Allen and his Sodexo staff care. They want the best for BVU, and they go out of their way every day to provide for this campus—to provide simple satisfaction. Be honest with Allen, and there is no doubt that he will listen.
Photo by Stephanie Steiner
