MS3304 --- Buddies' WIKI: Chapter 4&5 F&B Operations

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Q4) Choose One Topic (Could be Untaught Topic) about the Issues Occurred in F&B Operations and Explore the Details about it. Give Your Own Recommendations for Improvements

How to Keep up with the Quality of Room Service/In-Room Dining Service

Room service is a customized service provided by hotel for guest to enjoy their meal delivered and served by staff in their room. It was first offered by Waldorf Astoria in the late 1930s. Room service offered by hotels is very expensive as hotel charges their room service food with much higher price than market price together with a 15% service fee. As room service is not a profitable business for many hotels due to decline in demand and high operating cost, it is commonly found in medium to large scale hotel which aims at providing full-service to their customers or to keep their first class customers or VIP. There is high customer-contact and it is very important to maintain the service quality for the whole process of room service.

However, the service quality of room service cannot be easily controlled. Room service quality varies when it is provided by different staff of the hotel. Server usually provides room service alone or with one more staff assist and no other servers can give immediate help if there is anything goes wrong. If the server performance does not match with what customers expected, it will lead to customers’ dissatisfaction which probably affect the customer consideration of using the same hotel for their next travel. The reputation of hotel may also be affected if dissatisfied customers post negative comments on the Internet, which stop other customers from choosing the hotel. Besides, the overall turnover rate for employee in the restaurant-and-accommodations sector has increased to 66.3% in 2014 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover. Facing the high turnover rate of employee, it means hotel always has to train new employee for providing up to standard service. This use a lot of resources and pose threat for providing continuous high quality room service. So, how can hotels keep up with their room service quality by having a group of well-trained and competent employee?

Recommendations

1. Giving Training Courses and Set Clear Guidelines

Even if the server has basic knowledge related to hospitality, the room service procedure may be differ for one hotel to another. Thus, hotel may give training courses to staff who would is going to provide room service. The course content may include serving attitude, standard procedures and way of response to accidental situations for providing room service. For example, customers always come first, how dishes and cutlery should be placed in front of customers, what sentence should be said when serving the customers, etc. As service is difficult to be precisely presented by words, sample videos can be shown and practices can be given to help staff better remember and understand what to do. It is important for the hotel training staff to emphasise on why servers have to follow various steps in procedure and how it is associated with other departments and customer satisfaction. When the employees understand the reason behind every acts in the room service, they will be more please to follow the procedure. Hotel should give out guidelines in course and give practical examination to see whether the staff can follow all basic procedures and are ready for work before they start providing room service.

2.Provide Checklist for Room Service Server

A checklist may also be provided to assist new servers who may not be very familiar with every details of providing room service. It can help the employee to check and make sure that he or she has done what is needed basically to provide an up-to-standard room service to hotel customers. For example, knock the door and ask politely before starting room service, confirm the bill with customer before leaving, etc.The checklist should return to manager to make sure the new servers have used the checklist to assist checking their own work in room service.

This is a checklist for housekeeping inspection. Similar checklist could be set up for room service staff to check whether they have missed any details.

3. Sudden Inspection

As in-room dining service is done by one to two person only for each time, the hotel cannot have instant monitoring for room service provided by every servers. To tackle with this problem, the training staff can have sudden inspection for the server performance with an evaluation form. The training staff may follow and observe room service provided by every staff from time to time and evaluate on staff’s service. The training staff should give encouragement as well as suggestions on what they should improved to provide better service to customers. This enables hotel to make sure the room service provided by servers matches with hotel requirements and fulfill customers expectation.

4. Company Culture Reinforcement and Evaluation Meeting

Ways Great <b>Meeting</b>s Can Drive Your Organization Forward

To tackle with the high turnover rate of employee, holding company culture reinforcement and evaluation meeting is important. Reminding their employees about the hotel vision and culture regularly helps increase their sense of belonging of employee to hotel. It is also important to deliver a message to the room service employee that they are not only providing room service but customers’ impression on hotel and hotel reputation depends on hoe they perform. Doing evaluation helps employees to better understand their duty and responsibility for their job position and perform better in the future. Allowing employees to understand the meaning of their work help increase their work satisfaction, which may help to sooth the high turnover rate problem.

Evaluation:
Through doing research on this topic, I understand that the demography always changes and the need of new generation is different from the customers hotels used to service. More of them focus of budget-conscious tour and they pay more attention on hotel providing core service and fashionable design rather luxury one. They treat hotel as a place for overnight stay only rather a place enjoying leisure as they would like to put more time on exploring the place they visit. The service provided by hotels around the world has to keep up with the trend to stay competitive in the hospitality industry. I learn that working in hospitality has to be adaptable to changes and modify the way of serving the customers according to trends when necessary.

References:

Q3) Explore Different Ways of Sustainability in F&B

Not only the producers, customers of food and beverage industry are also more concerned about the sustainability now. Customers care about where their foods and drinks come from, what are the effects on health and on the environment. This article will talk about some trends of sustainability of food and beverage in real life.

Organic food and beverage
Organic food has become popular in recent years, many customers are willing to pay premium price to purchase organic foods and beverages which are produced without the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. These customers purchase organic foods and beverages because they are more aware of the negative effects that modern production processes cause to the environment and their health. The environment is also protected from the pollution of chemical substances. Also, for some small farmers, they may be benefited by the trend of consuming organic goods and beverage as they cannot afford synthetic pesticide and fertilizer anyway.

Fair trade

Unlike the famous organic product, fair trade product may be less popular worldwide, yet the estimated spending on fair trade product has greatly increased in recent years. Fair trade protects the suppliers of raw materials from being exploited through the supply chain. When farmers trade their product on fair trade terms, they are then able to get better deal. Fair trade organizations even help farmers and workers improve their social, economic and environmental condition.

Eco-packing

Produces and customers also seek food and beverage sustainability from the package of the product. In the past, appearance and convenience of the package might be the most important concern, but people also want to lower the effect of the package on the environment now. Therefore, packages are also expected or preferred if they are recyclable and do not consume too much material. Also, people are trying to replace traditional packaging material which cause serious pollution to the environment. For example, a biodegradable material called bio-plastic is invented.

Food preference

Taste and price were the most important factors in choosing of food and beverage. But in recent year, healthy and safety have been a big concern for consumers. Food and beverage producers focus more on their materials' safety and try to product more healthy products to consumers in order to build a sustainable relationship with their customers. Food safety scare in Taiwan recently is a good example for produces to know the important of food safety. And McDonald's healthy menu shows the trend of healthy diet.

Conclusion

After writing this article, we learnt that how to attract customers to consume is not the only concern. Management in food and beverage industry also focus on how to develop a long term, sustainable practice. Therefore, we also need to deal with problems like the development of relationship with material suppliers, choice of input, how the product is packaged, quality control of input and changing customer preference.

Reference:

https://www.nzte.govt.nz/en/export/market-research/food-and-beverage/sustainability-trends-for-food-and-beverage-in-asia-may-2014/

http://www.gov.mb.ca/agriculture/market-prices-and-statistics/food-and-value-added-agriculture-statistics/pubs/global_sustainability_trends_en.pdf

http://www.fairtrade.net/the-fairtrade-marks.html

Q2) Discover the Recent Trends and Challenges in Operating F&B Operations

Business world changes day to day, and so does Food and Beverage operations. Tons of profit could be lost due to one slow move. In the following article, recent trends and challenges in operating F&B operations will be discussed.

Trends:

Sustainability

This topic is one of the most popular topics among almost all the industries nowadays. People's awareness concerning whether this brand is environmental friendly or not has raised to sky high these days. In order to capture customers who are making purchases with this consideration, numerous restaurants started to follow this trend and source their raw materials from sustainable sources.

Having Cafe Decoral as example, they have been following the Seafood Guide produced by the World Wide Fund for Nature and source their seafood in a "greener" way and aim at procuring more than 50% sustainably sourced seafood by 2016.

2. Nutritional Value

As more and more profit are generated from health products, having a healthier diet is an unstoppable trend to huge amount of customers. Some of the restaurants, especially fast food and meat-lover restaurants design their menus with nutritional values on.

This kinds of menus provide a clear look to customers about what they are in-taking by making such order.

3. Beverages

People who go bars and clubs are more educated when comparing to the past, or have done researches about different kinds of infusing drinks to act as an expert in front of the others. Drinks which are already been well known of years are getting less popular, and their place are started to be taken by newly invented infusing drinks.

These drinks are more somewhat healthier than the traditional ones and more acceptable to the female group. This highly require creativity from designers and bar tenders, since they need to figure out which combination will make them stand out from the crowd.

Challenges:

Interactive presentation

This is not a significant trend, a lot of high-ended restaurants started this long ago. But more and more restaurants have blended this feature into their business nowadays. One famous restaurant would be Simplylife.

One of the most famous and popular cooking shows, Master Chef, has brought this feature into a next level. People started to love watching how chefs prepare food. The reason of this feature becoming a challenge is because it is a double-edged sword. The best benefit it brings is the attractiveness; however, everyone knows that most of the hygiene of the kitchens of restaurants are horrible. Restaurants which adopt this feature has to keep its tidiness for whole day in order to bring out marvelous presentations.

2. Tightening budget

The current economic situation requires restaurants to maintain their qualities without raising prices. One of the hardest things to run the business is about how to raise the quality and efficiency without investing, and the only way is to analyze and redesign menus.

Way to improve:

The key is to make the menus look like in a "Facebook" way, which means more pictures and less words; however, none of the restaurants owners would love to have their customers ordering foods which are lower in price. Therefore, they need to highlight the more profitable cuisines without being too obviously which could easily resulted in causing bad impressions from customers.

References:

http://www.egcoa.eu/top-5-food-beverage-trends-2014/

https://www.tgifridays.com/nutrition.pdf

http://www.cafedecoral.com/eng/corp_social_respon/csr_reports/images/CafeDeCarol_SR2014_20150715/index.html#35/z

http://www.shape.com/healthy-eating/healthy-drinks/8-infused-water-recipes-upgrade-your-h2o

Q1) Functions and Responsibilities of F&B Operations

Food and Beverage Management

In every hotel, the food and beverage division is led by the director of food and beverage. He or she reports to the general manager and supervise the departments of kitchen/catering/banquet, restaurants/room service/minibars, and lounges/bars/stewarding.

The common skills needed by a F&B Director are as follow:

Exceeding guests' expectations in F&B offerings and services, or creating moments of truth to them.
Leadership for managing various F&B related departments and corresponding staff.
Identifying trends, such as what types or origins of food are favored by the targeted customers, like Korean food/ food with high nutrition values.
Recognizing and retaining outstanding employees (retention).
Training
Motivation, such as bonus and promotion
Budgeting, such as setting quotas for certain kinds of food
Cost control, savings
Finding profit from all outlets, where fine-dining restaurants are usually non-profitable, but are important for hotel's image.
Having a detailed working knowledge of the front-of-the-house operations.

Moreover, making food and beverage sales profitable is the most critical issue whenever there are stagnant occupancies and decline in room sales. The acceptable profit margin from a hotel's F&B division would generally be 25 to 30 percent of the hotel's operating profit.

Kitchen (Food Production)

A hotel kitchen is supervised by the executive chef/ kitchen manager, who reports to the director of F&B, with the responsibility to maintain efficient and effective operation of kitchen food production. He is expected to exceed guests' expectations in the quality and quantity of food. Since the Kitchen is a cost center, he has to control the costs carefully, such as labor costs (variable costs) and over-head expenses.

There are some key indicators for the financial performance of the Kitchen, such as food cost percentage and labor cost percentage, generally expressed in ratios.

Food Operations (Food Service)

Hotel restaurants are run by restaurant managers. They are especially responsible for setting and maintaining quality standards, marketing/ promotion, coffee service, in-room dining, and presenting periodic forecasts and budgets to the F&B director.

The restaurant manager should also consider the number (house count) and type of hotel guest so as to estimate the number of expected restaurant customers for dining. For example, some hotel guests would stay in the hotel overnight but have separate dining arrangements outside the hotel. This is the capture rate, which is coupled with historic and banquet activity and hotel occupancy, for the restaurant to forecast the number of expected guests.

Bars

The profit percentage on beverages is much higher than it is on food items because food cost is usually more expensive than beverage cost. Also, beverages are not as perishable as food. Thus, it is an important revenue source for the hotel.

In large hotels, they may have service bar for room services, pool bars for providing drinks in swimming pool, sports bars, casino bars, etc.

The general beverage cycle would be Ordering, Receiving, Storing (warehouse storage), Issuing (from storage to bar), Bar Stocking (keep beverage stock at bar), Serving (serve guests), and Guest billing.

The main responsibilities of a bar manager are as follow:

Supervising the ordering process and storage of wines
Preparing wine lists
Overseeing staff's behaviors
Maintaining cost control
Assisting guests with their wine selection, with the help of sommeliers
Proper service of wine (Professionalism)
Knowledge of beers and liquors and their service, such as how to consume the wine properly (e.g. combination of certain food & wine would be tasty)

For proper service of wine, training in related to alcoholic beverage service should be provided to beverage service staff.

For pilferage issue, Automatic dispensing system can prevent employees to steal wine. Also, guests' bills checking can prevent overcharging customers. Pouring on top of the bar can prevent underpouring. Bottle stamp can prevent employees to bring in their own bottle for selling their wine.

Stewarding Department

It is managed by Chief Steward, who is responsible for the cleanliness of back of house of dining areas, glassware, china and cutlery. He has to maintain strict inventory control (e.g. chemical stock) and monthly stock check as well. Maintenance of dishwashing machines, sanitation, pest control, and forecasting labor and cleaning supply needs are also main duties of the Chief Steward.

Catering Department

Catering includes a variety of occasions when people may eat at varying times; Banquets means groups of people would eat together at one time and in one place. For instance, occasions for celebrations like National days, Gala charity balls, Weddings, Fashion shows, etc. Generally, catering has a broader scope than banquets.

The director of catering is responsible for selling conventions, banquets, and functions, being creative and knowledgeable about food, wine, and service, and being well versed in the likes, dislikes, and dietary restrictions of numerous ethnic groups (e.g. vegetarian and people with religion).

Catering

There are various room setups for different client's needs, which are theater style, classroom style, horseshoe style, etc.

Theater style/ Auditorium is usually for seminar; classroom style is usually for corporate training; Horseshoe style is usually for press conferencing.

Catering Event Order (CEO)

A CEO / banquet event order (BEO) is prepared for each function to inform both clients and the hotel person-in-charged about essential information to ensure the success of events.

Catering Coordinator

He is responsible for double-checking last-minute details and operating web-enabled technology system, such as the Newmarket International's Delphi System (for booking rooms and equipment).

The Delphi System can keep inventory current in real time because of its ability to interface with the PMS. The suite of Delphi products allows function space to be clearly and concisely managed, which increases guest satisfaction and profitability.

Catering Services Managers (CSM)

This role is demanding because several functions could occur simultaneously. The CSM needs to be liked and respected by guests and be a superior organizer and supervisor. He have to schedule the staffing roster for all events, check with the room setup, food, beverages, and services are well-prepared, calculate and distribute the gratuity and service charges for the service personnel, etc.

Room Service/ In-Room Dining

The desired outcome is to bring the dining experience to the room with quality food and beverage service. The larger the hotel and the higher the room rate, the more likely the hotel would offer room service.

However, there are some challenges in operating room service, the major one is delivering orders on time, especially for breakfast.

To deal with the late delivery of orders, some hotels have dedicated elevators to be used only by room service during peak hours. There are also Rapid action teams (RAT), who are designated food and beverage managers and staff who can be called on when room service orders are heavy.

Evaluation

What we have learnt from this lecture were the main roles and responsibilities of different positions under the Food and Beverage department, as well as bar operations. We also understood the room services / in-room dining would be more likely to be offered when the hotel is larger with higher room rate.

Reference

Walk, J.R. 2010. Introduction to hospitality management. Pearson Prentice Hall. New Jersey. 3rd ed.

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