Q2b) Challenges and recent trends on Schools

The primary service of schools is to provide education through teaching knowledge, skills, and delivering positive and decent values of judgement. There are commonly three types of schools, which are primary schools, secondary schools as well as colleges and universities. 

Other than education, schools have to offer food services to students, especially for primary and secondary schools. The following would mention the related challenges and trends on schools' managed services of food service operations.

Challenges

1. Retaining BOTH guest and client's satisfaction

Nowadays, the society has been increasingly aware of food safety and nutrition values of food. Typically in primary and secondary schools, many students would join some kind of School Lunch Program, where the schools would provide them a set of meals everyday. Guests, the students, prefer tasty food with higher food varieties. However, parents care more about what kinds of food are included in the lunchbox, like whether there are any junk food (food safety) or low nutrition valued food. They worry the lunchbox would adversely affect their children's health and puberty development.

For instance, World Health Organization (WHO) reported that eating sausage and bacon could be causes of suffering from cancer, which have classified as carcinogenic to humans (Group 1, which is same group of tobacco smoking) (WHO, Oct 2015). Schools have to face these contingency issues/ news and take immediate actions if the contracted food service providers offer such kind of food.

2. Demand for high diversity of food

There are wide food varieties today, such as Korean, Japanese, Hong Kong style, etc. Schools have to investigate children's eating habits and preferences so as to ensure they are satisfied with the food. Meanwhile, schools have to be aware of the nutrition values of those food before implementation.

3. Demand for customized food

Other than food safety and nutrition concerns, customized food with good quality is also crucial. In primary schools, all of the students are relatively small-aged. Thus, schools have to ensure food providers will cut the food into smaller pieces, preferably boneless food. As a result, children would not choke on a fish bone or food in huge size.

4. School enrollment

In recent decade, declining enrollment is a concern for education industry. According to HKSAR Education Bureau, the Pupil-Teacher Ratio in primary school have declined from around 16 to 1, to around 14 to 1 between 2009 and 2015. Therefore, it is reasonable the demand for school's managed food and beverage service would definitely decrease.

Trends

1. Contract management (Walk, 2010)

In regard to college and university students' fast pace life style, there is a trend that tertiary campuses sign contracts with branded, quick-service restaurants, such as chain restaurants like McDonald's, Starbucks Coffee, and Subway. For instance, there are McDonald's, Starbucks Coffee shop, and Maxim's in Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

The well-known brand effect could attract more customers, which is beneficial to both the restaurants and the university. Moreover, take-away services could provide convenience to university staff and students. It could stimulate their expenditure during dining time (lunch and dinner), before and after some student events. In short, the university can maximize their sales revenue by capturing these captive clientele.

In addition, the university can benefit a lot from contract management. It's because those food service providers possess their expertise in size and types of operations. The university can leverage their abundant resources and support so as to provide exceptional food services to students.

2. Increase in use of food-service carts at vantage points

Food-service carts have total flexibility in geographic mobility. Once the vantage points change, even frequently, the carts can move to the new vantage point so as to capture more customers and maximize their sales revenue.

For example, there is a coffee cart outside the lecture theater no. 17 in the Academic Building 1 at the City Univerisity of Hong Kong.

Evaluation & Conclusion

In this era of age, food safety  and health concern are of the essence. In July 2014, it was found that McDonald's China did not perform proper food processing and raised the public's attention. To prevent any food scandal, food safety is an essential element in schools' F&B managed services. Moreover, the food services at HKUST and CityU have demonstrated the trend of contract management and food-service carts at vantage points.

All in all, there are various challenges and concerns in terms of nutrition, food quality and safety. Meanwhile, contract management (or outsourcing) of food services can bring numerous benefits to the university. There is a trend of using food-service carts at vantage points as well.

References

Campus Services Office - HKUST. Restaurants. Retrieved from https://www.ab.ust.hk/cso/res_mcdonald.htm

HKSAR Education Bureau. Primary Education. Retrieved from http://www.edb.gov.hk/en/about-edb/publications-stat/figures/pri.html

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

World Health Organization. (Oct 2015). Q&A on the carcinogenicity of the consumption of red meat and processed meat. Retrieved from http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/