Transcript: Episode 163: Ice Bucket Investigation
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[00:00:00] Susan Barry: This is Top Floor episode 163. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/163.
[00:00:12] Narrator: Welcome to Top Floor with Susan Barry. This weekly podcast right up to the top floor features tangible tips and excellent stories from the experts and characters who elevate hospitality. And now your host and elevator operator, Susan Barry.
[00:00:32] Susan Barry: Welcome to the show. Aurora Dawn Benton is a sustainability consultant, speaker, and founder of Astrapto, a company focused on driving social and environmental impact within the hospitality industry. With an eclectic career spanning tech, finance, education, and hospitality, Aurora's work includes partnerships with industry leaders such as the Events Industry Council, where she has led multiple projects on food waste reduction. Aurora is also the author of Exponential Impact: Harnessing Human Potential to Drive Sustainability in Organizations, which is a guide for integrating sustainability into corporate strategies. Today we are going to talk about the importance of engaging line level staff and creating lasting change but before we jump in, we need to answer the call. button.
Call button rings
[00:01:31] Susan Barry: The emergency call button is our hotline for hospitality professionals and anybody else with a burning question. If you would like to submit a question, you can call or text me at 850-404-9630. Today's question was submitted by Scott, and this is what Scott has to say: “I don't mean to be glib, but as an event manager, why should I care about food waste? If the client wants to pay for it isn't that their own business?” I think this is a good question for you, Aurora. What do you think about this?
[00:02:08] Aurora Dawn Benton: Oh my goodness. I hear this a lot. So, um, I'm ready for it. I think it's a very fair question. I think it's easy for us to automatically look at, like, oh, if you're serving less food, you can save money or, you know, oh, we need to feed the hungry in our community and we can unpack more of what those kinds of strategies are. But ultimately, I feel like food and beverage in events has been treated very much like it's calories between sessions and meeting a minimum. And we don't spend enough time making food and beverage an experiential and strategic part of our meetings. And the way I look at sustainability, the way I approach sustainability is it should elevate and augment your strategy and your goals, not overtake them. And so when you have a lens of sustainability on food and beverage, whether that's food waste, diversity, supplier diversity, any other sort of social or environmental impact element, you're going to be taking a closer look at what it is you're doing and why is it you do it that way, right? So it sort of forces you to step back because waste becomes white noise.
[00:03:28] Susan Barry: Very interesting. Well, I know we'll get into more detail, but let's take a step back. Your career spanned corporate jobs in technology, finance, for profit, higher ed. What led you to shift gears into sustainability?
[00:03:46] Aurora Dawn Benton: So I had a number of, layoffs and changes in my career and some of that sort of forced me into a soul searching mode, but sometimes I was just like, I'm kind of done with this thing. Let's go. I want to work in Silicon Valley. I made that happen. I want to work in the financial services industry. I made that happen. I want to work in Latin America. I made that happen. I want to live in Chicago. I made that happen. I want to be a professor. I made that happen. I want to get a doctorate degree. And I made that happen. But when it came to sustainability, when I was laid off from a job in 2016, and I had this little voice always saying like one day I want to work in corporate social responsibility. And I realized for the first time in my life, I felt a little paralyzed to go after the thing that I wanted. I mean, it was never easy to go after those changes. You know, you had to do a lot of networking and researching and figuring it out. But for the first time I realized that I was truly scared and I was waiting on permission from who I don't know. And that really forced me to kind of look in the mirror. And I read a book that was gifted to me called The Confidence Code, and it's about confidence in women and the feminist in me awakened and took over. I was like, no, this is my lane. This is the line I'm going to cross. I'm going to only do this kind of work moving forward. And so it was just the next evolution in a series of big risks and big leaps I had taken my entire life, leading me up to what I think was my destiny.
[00:05:23] Susan Barry: This may be a little bit of a chicken and egg type question, but how much did your corporate jobs shape your approach to sustainability? Like, did you become interested in it because you observed waste in a hospitality setting or did - you were already interested in sustainability. And so you just decided to apply that to hospitality because you knew hospitality. Does that make sense?
[00:05:49] Aurora Dawn Benton: Yeah, absolutely. Well, my background — so first of all, at my core, and this is, this is something very important for people to understand when I'm starting to work with them around sustainability — at my core, I'm not a tree hugger. I'm a businesswoman. I'm good at strategy. I'm good at communication. I think business is a great thing and I'm good at it. And so I see sustainability as a way to make business better. So I have this background in technology and software and these other industries that helped me really understand efficiencies, data management, risk management, just, you know, basic business one on one stuff, right? So when I work with clients, I see opportunities to help them in areas that just don't even have anything to do with sustainability. And the great thing about that is that makes it easier to sell what it is I'm doing.
So for example, one client that I've worked with a number of years, they have leased offices all around North America. And when we first started working with them doing greenhouse gas emissions, uh, accounting, we were like, okay, well, we need all your leasing data. We need, you know, zip codes and square footage and lease start and end dates. Three years in, we still didn't have good, consistent, accurate data. How do you not know? And I don't fault them because you know what, I've worked with dozens of businesses that have the same kind of, you know, when businesses grow, especially if they grow through maybe acquisitions or mergers or anything like that, things just get messy. And everybody's focus is going to be on the top line, of course, in those kinds of scenarios. And so this kind of stuff falls through the cracks. And unless something comes up that makes it risky or important, you know, it's not really the top, the top of mind issue. And so we come in and we're like, uh, we got to clean this up. And you know what, that helps us do our job from a sustainability standpoint. We were able to point out how many offices they had that were incredibly inefficient, which they've now downsized greatly.
[00:07:42] Susan Barry:That they probably didn't even know they had!
[00:07:44] Aurora Dawn Benton: Right, exactly. Right. But we were like, did you know that you have like over 10 offices with an average of 750 square foot per person? That's bigger than most apartments in New York. Now, in terms of kind of what triggered it, I got my interest first in social impact. And where that really came from is you know, 30 years ago or so, I was seeing people in like the faith community that would go to another country and work at an orphanage or they would paint homes and build homes or work with kids or plant gardens for the community. I was like, I don't really like kids. I'm not good at gardening. I can't. I don't really, I'm not good with like hand eye coordination, stuff like painting, like I'm good at business. What, where's the service opportunity for me, right? I'm not, I mean like, yes, I can show up to an orphanage and paint and play with kids, but none of that stuff is really interesting to me. That's just not who I am. But I'm good at like business plans. I'm good at mentoring entrepreneurs. How can that be used in sort of a faith-based or service-based kind of scenario?
And so then I started really studying and understanding what social enterprises were, and I was especially intrigued by businesses that had a for-profit model where they were providing job opportunities to people who face barriers to employment, whether that's disabilities, you know, criminal history or whatever. And I just thought, what a brilliant way to use business to benefit the world. Like like more than just sort of like, oh, you know, it makes the world go around money wise. But to really like give people dignity in their work. That makes my heartbeat dignity in work is such a powerful thing. A beautiful and wonderful thing. And it's what everyone deserves. I don't care what your job is. Everyone deserves dignity and work. And so that just sort of forced me to think more and more about, enslaved labor and supply chains and all this other sort of social impact stuff. And then eventually as I decided to really make this a career, I dove into the environmental side. And of course that, I love that piece too, but it really did start on the social side.
[00:09:53] Susan Barry: Interesting. Well, that's a good segue because it's very clear to me that reinvention has sort of been a through line in your career. What do you think is the appealing part about completely changing industries or getting new degrees in subjects that you haven't studied before? Like, what do you think is driving you to do that?
[00:10:17] Aurora Dawn Benton: Yeah, I think part of it is boredom. You know, I get bored easy. I like change. I love change. I've moved, I've lost count of the number of times I've moved and changed cities and I, I just love change. And even within my business, a lot of people in this space will focus a little more narrowly than my business has. We work in the whole events ecosystem, hotels, convention centers, planners, destination management organizations, travel manager, like the whole piece of it. Cause I like to, I like to be in, in all of it. I like diversity and variety, but I, and I love learning. And I love the fact that each time I go into a business or an industry, like I just have an intuitive sense of like, oh, oh, okay. I get it. Like, I like to see how things work. Like, let me see how this works. Okay. So let's see the business model. Oh, okay. I got it. Like, oh, I think I can help this. Right. I could cross pollinate it, right? And I, you know, like an example of this is. I do love focusing on hospitality and I don't mind being a little bit pigeonholed that hospitality and events is sort of like what I'm known for and what I do because I love it so much.
But I recently got to do a two day virtual workshop on sustainable procurement. So I built this online course on sustainable procurement. I built it for anyone in any industry, there's like 600 people around the world who've taken this course and they're from all over and all kinds of industries. But I was asked to do this, this one for this company that manufactures tanker trucks. Now you couldn't get further away from hospitality. I mean, this is like, you're manufacturing a thing, tanker trucks. Right? And so I was like, all right. And what I knew is that fundamentally the people that I was talking to fundamentally what they needed to understand is how to drive change in their organization and how to find the problems in their supply chains. I'm not going to, I'm not going to be able to tell them every problem in their supply chain, much less fix that for them. But if I spark curiosity and show them how to research this stuff and how to look for it and how to start having conversations about it, that's the real job. And so for me, I kind of had a lot of fun diving in like, well, let's see tanker trucks. So they probably deal with a lot of like, let's, what, what are the primary metals they deal with? Oh, a lot of aluminum. Well, guess what? There's a lot of enslaved labor in aluminum supply chains coming out of China. Well, let's learn a little bit more about that. I wonder where - Oh, it turns out they have like a special policy at this company about checking the aluminum supply chain. What about tires? Oh, tires are like a big problem, right? What about tools replacing and reusing and repairing tools or parts rather than just throwing them out? So there was a whole lot of stuff. E-waste is another thing because there's a lot of electronic components on these things. So, I was able to like, take what I knew and be like, Ooh, this, Ooh, this, and it kind of enlightened them.
I mean, this is their industry, but I'm enlightening them on things they didn't know because of the piece I bring to the table. And I would say that, my company name, Astrapto means to illuminate and enlightening and illuminating people is, is that is my jam. So to do that, I need to know what they know, plus a little bit more and shine a light and bring them along the path.
[00:13:34] Susan Barry: We referred earlier to line level staff. How do you engage line level staff and sustainability programs? And maybe say a little bit about why you believe that they play such a crucial role in making all of this successful making it work.
[00:13:53] Aurora Dawn Benton: Yeah, absolutely. I think that a lot of people really, really miss out on the role they can play. Not just in making a sustainability program successful and happen, but even more so in not sabotaging your sustainability efforts. So, like, I remember when I first was getting into this space, like, 8 years ago, and green cleaning was starting to be a thing, it's even more of a thing now. Especially since Covid and the idea of chemicals and everything is really, you know, it come to people's consciousness. But I remember hearing stories, lots of stories of how housekeepers, and I've even seen this like touring hotels and going into like, oh yeah, we only use this brand. And then you go into like the storerooms and you're like… they bring in stuff from home. If they don't like the things that you're using, they will bring in products from home. They will misuse the green products because they don't believe they work. So when they misuse them, they only perpetuate the myth because they make them sticky or whatever. They make them not work because they're not using them.
And then the same with food waste. Oh my goodness. You can have the best program in the world, but all you need is one cranky banquet captain to override all your, all your Because they can call the kitchen screaming for another pan of chicken and everybody's going to drop what they do and trust this person because they've been working there for 30 years and make another pan of chicken even when that pan of chicken is absolutely not needed. And so I think it's important to understand and what's important to also understand is that means that you cannot be punitive with them about the way they're doing this. They're following their heart. They're not trying to ruin your business or run your sustainability program. They truly believe that to do their job correctly and to serve guests and provide the best possible thing they do, that's what it takes. And unless you engage them, unless you unravel decades of habits, don't expect anything to be different. You've got to put dishwashers in the room, servers in the room, banquet captors in the room, stewards in the room, you know, the department managers in the room. I want marketing and sales in the room, your client service managers, I want them in the room. If you can give me those key champions or some representatives from each department and put them in the room, it is game changing.
[00:16:23] Susan Barry: In your book, Exponential Impact, you discuss leadership principles for driving sustainability. Can you give us kind of a high level glimpse of what those principles are and how they apply in hospitality specifically?
[00:16:39] Aurora Dawn Benton: Absolutely. So the first one is, is empathize, right? You got to understand where people are. And that includes a variety of stakeholders in hospitality. It's especially important to understand the owners and leaders mentality, right? Because they're, they're going to be driven by different kinds of decisions and different kinds of factors than a line level person. But it's also understanding line level people. I think, one of the things I say in the book is, I talk about the fact that we tend to think of ourselves as very benevolent in this work of sustainability, and we think we go in expecting, well, everybody should feel benevolent, but we have to understand that a lot of the line level people that we're trying to engage they live in the very communities. They live on the front line of climate change disasters and the communities that are hardest hit by economic issues, hunger rates, et cetera. And so this, we have to understand their direct connection to these problems and help them connect those dots. And when that happens, it's a very powerful thing. I see that happen a lot in training. When we're talking about the hunger piece of it and food donation, you can see a difference in the way people respond because this isn't just like, Oh, how nice to feed the community. This is like my neighbor is struggling with this right now. I grew up in this, so I get it and oh, I get to be part of that solution? So connecting those dots and really speaking the language of the people that you're encountering and trying to change.
The next principle is enlightenment. It's the why, right? You got to be really good at explaining the why. You can't just have a because I said so mentality, which unfortunately too many things are rolled out with sort of “because I said so” — it has to be the why behind it. And the enlightenment starts out as sort of like why it matters for the world. What's in it for you, but also how do you do your job? So it's instruction as well. And then the next one is empowerment, which, I call it the cornerstone because it's, you need all of them, but it's the one that if you don't have that one, the whole thing falls apart. So if you're empathizing with people and listening to them, but you're not empowering them to do anything, then you're just having conversations and you're not changing the world. If you're enlightening people, but then not empowering them to act on that, that's incredibly frustrating for people.
And then the last one is encouragement. And encouragement is the fact that this stuff's hard and it's lonely, lonely work sometimes, and people need to stay motivated and incentivized to do the work. But the empowerment piece is really where, in hospitality, I think that that comes down to really enabling those lower level people to make decisions. Give them some parameters and context so they can make better decisions, feel proud of those decisions, take ownership of those decisions, be heard, right? Green teams is another thing that I think — I know when I was first getting into hospitality in the hotel space, especially, I would hear a lot of like, "Oh, yeah, we, we had a green team once”. So, Like, did you have a marketing department once? Did you have a finance department once? Like, why is this the like, we checked the box. We had some meetings. Like, no, you would not treat any other function of your business that way. No way. Because if it's no one's job, it's no one's job.
[00:20:13] Susan Barry: That makes a lot of sense. I'm laughing because I'm thinking about all of the times that I've seen in hotels, committees happen and fizzle out or happen and fizzle out. It's such a good point. We had a green team once, makes me laugh. What is a story from your consulting work that sort of encapsulates maybe the challenges that you've touched on, but also some of the triumphs?
[00:20:39] Aurora Dawn Benton: Big break in when my when I started my company eight years ago, I want to contract with World Wildlife Fund, who has developed some really amazing tool kits and resources for hospitality food waste reduction. They have a website called hotelkitchen.org. And they care about food waste because we have so much biodiversity loss from clear cutting land to grow food that's never eaten. So that's why World Wildlife Fund is passionate about this concept of food waste. And they work in the, you know, the grocery industry, hospitality, all kinds of different food service sectors. So I had been doing work with them for a number of years. And what I love about that is when you work with an organization like World Wildlife Fund, you get to pilot things. You get to go to a hotel or convention center and say, “"Hey, let me do this work. Someone else is paying the bill.” And so I give them a ton of credit for being willing to be that thought leader and allow us to do the work that we've done, which builds all these amazing case studies and templates and you know, frameworks and stuff.
So after doing this work a number of years, I was doing a project with the Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment, which is a California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, like a sort of quasi governmental agreement. And one of their goals is to cut food waste in half by 2030, and they're partners with World Wildlife Fund, so that's how I was doing that work. So I was working with seven different hotel and convention center properties along the West Coast. West coast now, right? Oh, the environmental states, right? And so I started really kind of honing in on some of the things that I'd been seeing for a number of years. And what I started — also kind of going back to my, what I said earlier about like just basic business. Like, let's just think about sort of basic business approach. And I started thinking about the idea of the 80/20 rule, right? Like, you, you can fix 80 percent of the problems by just focusing on that 20 percent of stuff that's the most problematic. And I was like, you know, we've really overcomplicated. Like, I was kind of stepping back and looking at all these tools we'd built over the years, all this. I was like, we kind of, we've kind of overshot it. Like we're building tools for 10, 15 years out. We, we are not even, we haven't even started the prerequisites yet. So why don't we, let's back way up. What would it look like to have kind of an 80/20 rule?
Well, what that looked like is I started asking every single venue planners included, “What are the most wasted event items at your event?” Most wasted food items. And it's the same thing every single time. Bread, pastries, desserts, cookies, vegetables, fruit, all the salad stuff, and then sometimes there'll be like, cheese boards or crudités, you know, some other things like that that appear on the list. So I was like, well, we don't need to fix everything. Let's just fix those things. If we just fixed bread, guess what? We're not only reducing waste in bread, we are - we're going to save money because we're not going to produce extra bread we don't need. But we're establishing a process by which we can look at a problem, come up with a solution, suggest the solution and test it out and then make changes. So like in one case, one convention center, right after the training, they were like, “Hey, we used to put like 10 rolls on a 10 top. What if we, what if we reduced it to seven? Oh my God!” There's always more bread. It was fine that first night, so they made that a practice. And I talked to the general manager of that property about 10 months later, they had prevented, prevented as in not produced and served more than 10,000 rolls in that time. And so, like, that was the empowerment on that level.
Now, another in that same project, I was at this other property and I had some people in the room, including a banquet captain who had been at this property for 25 years. And I was talking about the, the problematic items. I was talking about fruit. And so I had some photos of different fruit platters after events. And it's not just fruit. It's the honeydew and cantaloupe. And we all know it. It's every time, right? I loved, I love presenting this because it never fails. It never fails. Every audience that I present, and I've presented this to, you know, easily a couple thousand people. Every time that gets a laugh and that just shows you how prolific the problem is, how funny it is. Cause we're all like, “Oh my gosh, we all do this.” So I had all these, you know, photos of different fruit platters with mostly cantaloupe and honeydew. And this banquet captain pipes up and he says, yeah, but melon is cheap. And I said, congratulations, you didn't pay much for that trash. Mic drop! It was like, I mean, the look on everyone's face. And so that just tells you the the entrenched culture of waste in the name of hospitality that exists in this industry.
[00:25:37] Susan Barry: We like to make sure that our listeners come away from every single episode of Top Floor with some specific tips to try in business or in their personal lives. If someone is listening to this and maybe they're the one woman show in their hotel who wants to start a green team or is the green team, what sort of practical advice do you have for that person looking to reduce food waste without compromising guest experience? It sounds like seven rolls is the first step.
[00:26:13] Aurora Dawn Benton: That is one step. I think, so I would say, first of all, to just understand what drives people to do what they do. They're not trying to create waste. They're not trying to, you know, pollute the world. They're trying to be hospitable and they're afraid of upsetting guests, upsetting planners, upsetting co-workers, upsetting their boss, upsetting themselves. They're afraid of running out of food, afraid of getting in trouble, and fear drives so much of this. And that's simple but incredibly difficult because it takes a long time to build trust and relationship. So I would say for that person, especially if you're not in the F&B role, you, you have to start to build trust.
Let them know from the very beginning that you're not trying to get them in trouble and you're not reducing your budget. You have requests that will help reduce food waste, which would reduce food cost on the hotel side. But I think if you're an F&B person, if you work in the food and beverage department, and whether you're on a green team or not, I think one of the easiest things to do is to start with vessels. Vessels drive so much waste. And that was one of the brilliant things about the work I did with PFWC a couple of years ago, the same time I came up with this prolifically problematic items. Another recurring theme was if you just improved and right sized your vessels, you would reduce a ton of waste. So what do I mean by that?
[00:27:46] Susan Barry: It's true. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but it's true because all, no, all the things that you listed, the reason I would guess that they are wasted is because you have to put out so many to fill up the basket or fill up the bowl or whatever.
[00:27:58] Aurora Dawn Benton: Exactly. So you could have a recipe — and I will tell you the smaller the event, the more disproportionately wasteful it is. Because the vessels are generally designed to serve, you know, like 50 people at a time. So if you've got an event of 25, 30 people, you, there's always enough food to feed a hundred that's set out because of just the way the vessels are designed and the way the recipes are built out. And what happens a lot of times is I'll come in and do the training — and usually the person who brings me in is not the executive chef. So the executive chef is usually a little resistant at first. They're kind of looking at me like, who are you to tell me how to do my job? I'm not here to tell you how you do your job. You're a smart person who got to where you are for a good reason. I'm here to show you the problem. I don't even need to solve it for you. You already know the solution. You're just not willing to see it. But once I can turn the light on and get you to see it, that that's all I need to do. And that works, right? So they will immediately see like, “Oh, that's the problem.”
So what happens a lot of times is I'll be talking about, for example, salad dressings, and they'll pipe up and say something like, “Well, I know how many ounces of salad dressing per person.” Okay. But are you the one pouring salad dressing into bowls? Do your line cooks know that? Are they actually measuring it? Are they just grabbing a bowl and filling it to the rim? Because that is how it's happening, not by measurement. And by the way, I've seen your recipe and it calls for eight ounces of salad dressing per person. Don't even tell me… like what? Okay. So anyway, um, so vessels — and I will actually share some, some great case studies you can put in the show notes. But for example, with one hotel, that we worked at, um, the Hyatt in Seattle. Great, really great experience working with them. And the show planner was Green Biz, which is by default green, you know, like they're a conference all about sustainability.
So we were working with both the hotel and the planner to come up with some changes. And so on the first morning for breakfast, they typically would serve syrup in this sort of large cast iron thing that would hold a gallon of syrup in one thing. And I mean, I'm telling you the vats of syrup that you see at events. I always joke that you could bathe a small child in the vats of syrup that, and it's just messy and sloppy. Whoever decided that was a good idea? So they would serve it in this big cast iron pot. And so because we were there and watching and they're now watching one of the sous chefs said, “Hey, why don't we switch to the smaller, like square bowls? Like the kind of stuff you'd normally see salad dressing in.” And so it would take one gallon to fill up three of those. And so they went ahead and portioned it out, had them covered with plastic and they ended up preventing 60 percent waste. The syrup that would have just sat out there was now in a bowl covered back of house and could be reused.
After that event, we talked to them and they were looking at sourcing sort of a coffee carafe style thing that you could pour syrup and then that way you basically have zero waste. Every once in a while you clean it out, you scrape it out, you use what syrup is left in a pastry item and zero waste. And when you're serving like high end, good syrup, that's a lot of money, right? That can be $50, $60, $70 a gallon, depending on where you're sourcing it. So that kind of stuff adds up. And those are just easy, easy, really easy things. Vessels are usually, um, something that most people can easily fit in their budget. There's usually a rotating budget to update those things anyway. And so I almost every time see that the response in the room is like, “Oh yeah, we can do that.” And it's an immediate savings.
[00:31:32] Susan Barry: And it's, that's the main thing on a buffet, where you're like, why is there an entire field of salad greens represented for this 80 person dinner? Well, we have reached the fortune telling portion of our show, so you have to predict the future and then we'll see if you were right. What is a prediction that you have about the future of sustainability in the hotel business and hospitality as a whole?
[00:32:01] Aurora Dawn Benton: Well, I think that it's going to become more important just because of regulations and reporting requirements and how that is going to get filtered down to property levels. Right now a lot of that, in the hotel world, a lot of that is happening. It's very corporate level, but if you ask individual properties, they're not doing the metrics necessarily or counting. Of course, some brands have some good internal sort of portals and stuff and so they're starting to really gather all that data. So the data and the reporting is going to drive the insistence that something has to happen. Now, what the solution is — of course, if you're being futuristic about it — you're going to say, “Well, it's all this technology and AI and cameras and all that.” And that's all great. But unless you're going to 100 percent automate hospitality and take the people equation out — which I don't think you're going to do because the essential element of hospitality is fundamentally human-oriented. So as long as you're going to have people involved, if you want it to be successful, you have to have people involved and engaged. So I feel like it's a little bit of an old school answer to say that the future is engaging people because that's not exactly… it's not exactly high tech or anything, but I feel like we've dehumanized the workforce. And AI and technology can unfortunately have the side effect of dehumanizing the workforce.
[00:33:23] Susan Barry: If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about banquet event orders, BEOs, what would that be?
[00:33:30] Aurora Dawn Benton: Oh my gosh, these things.
[00:33:32] Susan Barry: Or would it be everything? For me, it would be everything.
[00:33:33] Aurora Dawn Benton: I mean, we have to go back to the drawing board. BEOs are just, they're these duct taped legacy systems in most, you know, corporate chains and convention center caterers and stuff like that. They are impossible to edit. I frequently hear that all of the, everything has to happen in multiple documents. Everything is done in a spreadsheet and then it's converted into some sort of internal system that creates the BEO. I was recently like I was doing some food waste audits recently and it was like a, you know, here's the BEOs for this like four day event. We're selecting which ones. I took a 650 page document and edited it down - first of all, by deleting all the blank pages. That delete that got it down to 400 and something pages just by deleting pages that literally had nothing but like a header on them,
[00:34:23] Susan Barry: Right? Or they'll have one sentence that's like with ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise and every like disclaimer and you know what I mean? It's the dumbest thing in the universe.
[00:34:39] Aurora Dawn Benton: Exactly. So I think I would love it. I would love it if we could go back to the drawing board completely, not just on the BEO, but the entirety. So when I teach food waste reduction, I teach this concept of the flow of food and we look at like, okay, there's designing food, like creating menus, there's ordering it - whether it's your internal procurement or people ordering it from you. There's prep, there's service, and then there's the eating, you know, the actual like flavor and taste and how much people put on their plates. There's problems and issues at every step of that way, right? And so, and there's a transfer of food and a transfer of information at every one of those steps. We have to fundamentally redesign the flow of the information because if we better manage that, not only are we going to reduce food waste, we are going to drastically cut food costs. Because if we’re throwing out 40% of our food — that's like kind of an average 40, 35 to 40% — if that's how much we're throwing out. And especially when you look at something like one of my favorites is like cheese boards. And, and so a lot of times, you know, I'll hear chefs say like, “Oh, those are really popular.” I'm like, yeah, people order them, but the talk to your dishwashers and the dishwashers are like, “Oh my God, we throw away so much cheese.”
Well, I did a food waste audit at an event not too long ago where we were looking at, they were serving these little cheese cubes cup snacks things. And for just this one day with two different break services with this little cheese cubes, there was more than 200 pounds of unserved cheddar that went into the garbage. And I found like there's this calculator water calculator for how much water is required to make certain foods. It takes 80,000 gallons of water to make 200 pounds of cheese. And the food cost of that was, you know, $1,500 or something. So that's just one convention center on one day for snack breaks. So you just add all that up and you think about the potential to reduce your food costs. Plus you got to haul all that away. Plus all the little cups, you know, the little disposable cups you put all that in. I mean, every, if every cent matters than every cent matters. And unfortunately, especially in hotels, because F&B isn't the bread and butter — no pun intended. But if you, if you really want to justify some of the investments I'm suggesting, then the money's there. You could, the business case is there, you just got to do the math. And we haven't been doing the math. So I think that, you know, I would, BEO is, is sort of the, the demon in this little discussion.
[00:37:17] Susan Barry: Okay, folks, before we tell Aurora goodbye, we are going to head down to the loading dock where all of the best stories get told.
Elevator voice announces, “Going down.”
[00:37:24] Susan Barry: What is a story you would only share on the loading dock?
[00:37:34] Aurora Dawn Benton: Well, it's funny. I just realized the connection. It's funny, the loading dock, because where this happened is sort of like the lower levels of hotel. So when I first got out of grad school and you know, it was like my mid to late twenties and I got a job with a technology company that did, you know, pretty big technology company that did technology for like retail and hospitality and banking and such.
And so I got to travel all around and I got to work these trade shows and just like living the life of a person in their twenties. So I was at a, working a big trade show at McCormick in Chicago and staying at one of the big hotels, and I went out one night to party with friends I had there in Chicago and I was out all night. So I'm coming back to the hotel at about 7 a.m. Wearing my disco garb. I got some like, bell bottom pants on and I'm looking a little sexy and everything. And I'm like, I cannot go traipsing through the lobby of this huge hotel dressed like this. So I had the taxi take me kind of around back. There was like this entrance that you kind of walk down these little steps or down a staircase and you kind of come into the business entrance. And so I was like, I'm just going to kind of sneak in there while I get to the top of the stairs. And as I'm going down, my heel catches the leg of my pants and I go tumbling down the stairs, this concrete stairs. And I land — I mean, you got to imagine.
So this guy's walking down, he's walking through like the business center downstairs area. And all of a sudden this woman just, just lands the stairwell right outside this door. So he comes over and he opens the door. And of course I'm exhausted. I've been up all night, you know, dancing and stuff. And so he opens the door and I'm like, I'm okay, I'm okay. So I kind of like get up, I go up to my room and I'm like, just totally dazed. And I'm, you know, I take my pants off and my knees are scraped up, my elbow’s scraped up and everything. I'm like, okay, let me just, let me just take a bath. Cause I gotta go work a trade show! So I'm like, let me just take a bath. So I, I go to get into the tub. And when I leaned, when I used my hands to prop myself up on the edges of the tub, this pain went shooting up my arm. And I was like, that's not normal. And so I felt like I probably just like sprained it or something.
So I call room service and ask for a bucket of ice. I just want a bucket of ice. They want to understand why do you need a bucket of ice? Well, I, I fell and I just need like a bucket of ice. Well, instead of a bucket of ice, a guy with a notebook shows up in my room. He's like, where did you fall? What happened? You know, just all these questions. I'm like, well, thanks for the TLC here. And so I was like, okay, I guess I should go to the emergency room. And so I, I get dressed and, and they take me downstairs and they put me in a cab and they're like, Northwestern, you know, they like tap the roof of the cab, okay. And so I, I ended up in the hospital and it was just a fracture. I fractured my elbow.
[00:40:41] Susan Barry: Oh my God. Listen, kids, this is why you do not stay out all night partying because you are going to the hospital.
[00:40:51] Aurora Dawn Benton: And I'm such, I'm generally such a responsible person. I mean, that is like, that is a rare moment, but you know. Good story.
[00:40:59] Susan Barry: Hey, it happens. Aurora Dawn Benton. Thank you so much for being here. I got so many good ideas and tips. I know our listeners did too. And I really appreciate you riding with us to the top floor.
[00:41:12] Aurora Dawn Benton: My pleasure. Thank you so much for letting me be on this ride.
[00:41:16] Susan Barry: Thanks so much for listening. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/163. Jonathan Albano is our editor, producer, and all around genius. He even wrote and performed our theme song with vocals by Cameron Albano. You can subscribe to Top Floor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. And your rating or review will go a long way in helping us give you more of what you like.
[00:41:51] Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Top Floor Podcast at www.topfloorpodcast.com. Have a hospitality marketing question? Reach us at 850-404-9630 to be featured in a future episode.