Bring It to the Table
F&B affects the meeting experience across the board. For planners, it can make or break the deal when deciding where to hold their programs.
When sifting through evaluations in a post-meeting haze, the discussion among planners and their staff (and their bosses, be it the CEO, executive VPs, or board of directors) inevitably turns to what attendees remember most from their experience. For some, it's the speakers; for others, the closing night gala; still others, the jeep tour or the Broadway show. But for better or worse, they all come together over one common denominator: their meals.
"What they remember is what they ate, so it's very important that you run a good food program," says Emmanuel Afentoulis, executive chef at Dolce Skamania Lodge in Stevenson, WA. Afentoulis' is the voice of experience--he's spent almost four decades working with group business in food and beverage at major hotels and conference centers across North America. "If they have good food, attendees can overlook other things," he says. If they love the food, he adds, chances are planners can walk away with a productive meeting and a happy crowd.
Thought for food
While F & B has long been a major player in most overnight meetings, these days its value in any type of program seems more important than ever. Planners need to account for a meeting's bottom line in many respects--money, time, and productivity, among them. Food and beverage can affect a meeting across the board, from palate and dietary concerns (e.g., "chicken again" lunch plates and carb-o-rama dinner combos) to wallet-centric issues that can wreak havoc on a budget. With that in mind, food and beverage can dictate where a group may eventually end up.
"I'm not going somewhere where my people will be bored, and one of those potentially boring things could be food, even great food," says Barcy Fox global director of professional development for Russell Reynolds Associates, an executive search firm based in Boston. With 30 years in the hospitality industry, Fox knows well that what attendees digest at the dinner table relates in great part to what they digest in the classroom. "They need to learn, so you need to keep them energized and engaged," she says. "The meeting rooms need to be comfortable--the chairs, the lighting, the temperature--and the meals need to be nutritionally balanced and appealing."
Moreover, a planner needs to do all that on a budget. Beverly Witt spent a decade in catering in the hotel industry before switching to event planning seven years ago at State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company. Witt's work slate currently includes some 300 meetings annually, about 15 to 20 percent of which are held at conference centers. Having experienced food and beverage costs from both sides of the financial fence, she appreciates how F & B fits into any budget. "All of our meetings have food and beverage," she says, with pricing a key factor in deciding where to hold a program. Ninety percent of the time she'll use pre-selected menus, usually a duo of filet and salmon, for example. Even then, making the meals cost-effective is paramount. "Prior to me signing any contract, I would need to make sure the price is within my budget," she says.
Not surprisingly, when Witt and other planners do the math, it quickly becomes apparent why food and beverage plays an important role in their meetings. For example, with one recent proposal, Witt's department came up with a food and beverage estimate of $3,600 out of an $8,000 budget-45 percent of the total. "That's one of our more typical meetings, and it will be at a hotel," she says. To help ease the bottom line, either in actual costs or bang for the buck, Witt will often enlist the aid of a property's catering department. "I usually do most of my work with them via email and hardly ever sit down and meet in person," she says.
| Let's do lunch. Witt, however, may be the seasoned exception on that account, thanks to her many years in hotel catering. According to Dolce chefs, the tide is changing: More and more planners are requesting to sit down with them—and the chefs are actually welcoming the chance to make their meetings better in every respect. It helps, of course, when the kitchen is focused on just one type of business. "The thing that's a little different in conference centers is that you do get to work with the planner one-on-one," says Virgil Emmert, executive chef at Dolce's Oak Ridge Conference Center in Minneapolis. For Emmert, a 20-year industry professional, talking turkey (or chicken Kiev and poached pears, for that matter) with a meeting professional is simply another part of the job. "It could be me, maybe the food and beverage director, and we'll work with the client," he says. "We'll say to them, 'We can do A, B, and C for this amount of money, but for a few dollars more, we'll add decorations,' and then we can blow them away. When you sit down face-to-face you can usually work it out." And while Dolce does a lot of Complete Meetings Package business, Emmert says the CMP program still offers enough flexibility to fit almost any group's needs. "Right now variety is the biggest thing planners look for," he says (see “Perspectives” boxes to see what real-life planners have to say about it), and it’s a concept that's also close to his heart. "I don't want to serve them chicken every day--it wouldn't be fun for them to eat or for me to cook." Rather, Emmert has adopted a four-week rotation at Oak Ridge that lends enough variation in his menus to avoid weekly repetition of the entrée bases. "We
have one group that starts here in April and stays through
October, one week a month," he says. "You've got
to keep moving forward with the menus or you'll get stagnant." Last fall, Russell Reynolds Associates put together a Southern-style wing ding for a group of international attendees in the maintenance barn at Dolce Norwalk Center. "We wanted to make the dinner exciting yet still speak to the global nature of our firm," says planner Barcy Fox, who worked with Dolce on variations of what was a pre-select menu. " We did a barn dance because I wanted something casual and informal that would enable attendees to network, but more active than just playing pool in the bar," she says. The menu was creative but not a stretch: chicken, steaks, salmon, cornbread, jalapenos, corn on the cob, and apple and pecan pies. And in the spirit of the moment, Dolce decorated the barn with corn stalks, burlap, and bunting to disguise the real work areas, then roped off the rest. The future is now If anything, the food and beverage segment of the meetings industry remains a work in progress, evolving in many ways towards a better product for planners and attendees alike. "We have a lot more menu options at hotels for breaks now than just pastries and popcorn, and I'm seeing that with conference centers as well," says State Farm's Beverly Witt. "It's a wide enough variety so that anyone could eat off of it." Barcy Fox also likes the trend towards more variety, be it for meals or break time. "People love ice cream and are into still into coffee and now tea and chai, and those are trends I see everywhere," she says. New and different also translates to quantity and execution. "There's a more heightened awareness of food because you see more about it in the media," says Oak Ridge's Virgil Emmert. He cites the growing popularity of ethnic cuisine, particularly tapas and small plates, which allow attendees the option of grazing as a compromise between hors d'oeuvres and a full-fledged meal. F & B continues to push the edge in terms of creativity as well. "We're getting into team-building, where I sort of stand by while the participants make the meal, like a chili cook-off, which can get very competitive as it progresses," says Emmert. And while variety can spice up a menu, attendees are increasingly insisting on the quality to back it up. "People
want to know what they're eating--organic, farm-raised,
etc.--and in our kitchen we prepare everything from scratch
when we can, which is most of the time," says the executive
chef. "People remember those things." |
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