Theft is a serious concern in food service operations as in any business.

Part 1

Theft is a serious concern in food service operations as in any business. This theft opportunity took place in the dietary department housed in a school for people with special needs. The department is open Monday through Friday year-round. The dietary department hours are routinely from 6:00 A.M. to 2:30 P.M. for food production, service, and clean-up activities. The kitchen manager, dietitian, and secretary work eight hours per day from 8:00 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. and are located in an office next to the kitchen. The department produces approximately 150 breakfasts and 650 lunches per day of operation. The manager, dietitian, secretary, head cook, head of the night custodian service, three maintenance workers, and the administrator have keys to the dietary department office and kitchen. Once the kitchen is unlocked in the morning at 6:00 A.M., all kitchen doors and storage areasremain unlocked throughout the day until 2:30 P.M., when the last of the kitchen workers leave. Sometime between 2:30 P.M. and 3:00 P.M., the manager would do the final walk-through to check the kitchen and lock all doors and storage areas. The office door is not locked until 4:30 P.M. The office has an internal door access into the kitchen that is never locked.

The cooking staff is scheduled to work staggered shifts beginning, with the first cook arriving at 6:00 A.M. and the dishroom workers and pot washers arriving last at 8:00 A.M. All kitchen staff are expected to be present for the lunch meal service, which is scheduled from 1 1 A.M. to 12:45 P.M. Because of the special population served, the dietary department staffs three separate lunch serving sites within the school. The full-time kitchen staff works 6 1 /2 hours per day. The parttime kitchen staff usually works a maximum of 4 hours per day. The cooking staff is responsible for cooking, baking, serving, and cleaning activities. The aides are responsible for delivering breakfast foods and snacks to classrooms, preportioning food items, serving food at lunch, and cleaning activities. The dishroom workers and potwashers are responsible for washing the baker’s and cooks’ pots and pans; washing lunch dishes; replenishing tray lines with clean dishes, trays, and so on throughout the lunch service time; and sweeping and mopping the department floors, with the exception of the large cafeteria floor. The large cafeteria floor is done at night by the night custodian service that is responsible for all of the floors throughout the school.

The lead cook or manager checks in the morning food deliveries. The manager or, occasionally, the dietitian or the secretary checks in the afternoon food deliveries. Food deliveries of milk and ice cream always arrive at 6:00 A.M. Produce deliveries routinely arrive by 8:30 A.M. The large food deliveries of all other items, including chemicals and paper goods, routinely come on Mondays and Thursdays in the afternoon between 2:00 P.M. and 3:00 P.M. Recently, however, the delivery times for the large food deliveries had been changing. The truck drivers were now frequently arriving during the lunch service time. Although the manager fussed at the drivers for their poor timing, she continued to accept their deliveries and she put away the frozen and refrigerated stock during the lunch meal service time. The manager would then leave the rest of the delivery on the floor in the back hallway outside of the dry goods storeroom until she could get back to it later that afternoon. This back hallway is where the drivers stacked all their items as they brought them in from the trucks.

The delivery back door is within 15 feet of the dry goods storage room and the main walk-in freezer and refrigerator. Large and small trucks and other vehicles can back up to within 8 feet of the kitchen delivery door. There is no loading dock at this delivery door. The delivery door is just off a large employee parking area that is shared between the school and a large medical center. The parking area is very active, with people coming and going throughout the day and night. Two very active side streets border the parking area. Street parking is also allowed on both sides of one of these streets.

Kitchen staffing had been changing over the past several months. Several long-term employees had retired, two had transferred to other departments, and one had married and moved out of state. Although active recruiting was in progress, the shortage of kitchen staff was at a crisis level. Through the recruiting and interviewing process, only one aide had been hired. The decision was made to seek temporary employees from a local temp agency and to continue the recruiting efforts. Within the week the temp agency sent a cook, an aide, and two dishwashers. All four temporary employees learned their jobs quickly and settled into the kitchen routine without incident.

Because of illness, jury duty, and unavoidable scheduled days off, the kitchen was still short the number of employees needed for normal operations, so the manager, secretary, and dietitian continued to assist with lunch service. When truck deliveries arrived at lunchtime, the manager would direct the truck driver to work with either the cook replenishing the pans of food for service lines or one of the dishroom workers if the cook was busy. The cook or the dishroom worker would check in the delivery and have the frozen stock stacked on the floor of the freezer, the cold stock stacked on the floor of the refrigerator, and everything else stacked in the back hallway. After lunch service was completed, the manager would sort and store all of the delivery items in the appropriate storage areas.

Within two weeks, the manager and the cooks started noticing missing items. At first it was a few cases of frozen meat and then it grew to frozen meats, cooler items, and cases of vegetables. The invoices indicated that the missing cases were received, but when the cooks went to pull the menu item for cooking, one or more cases or cans would be missing. One afternoon, all of the cases of special steaks that had been ordered for an important school board meeting were discovered missing within two hours of their arrival to the kitchen. The manager estimated that the thefts had cost her department more than $17,000 in food by the time the thefts were solved and stopped.

Questions 

1. Were the kitchen and storage areas easily accessed? please  Explain your answer. 

2. How could the kitchen and storage area access be limited without interfering with kitchen operations? 3. Did the change in the delivery time by the truckers provide opportunity for theft to occur? Explain your answer. 

4. How could the manager and dietitian use the department’s employee schedules to eliminate suspects? 

5. Would camera surveillance with tape recording capability help prevent this type of theft in the future?

Part 2

A labor dispute was brewing at Broadworth Community Hospital, a 140-bed general medical center. Broadworth’s food service department includes a food service director, four dietitians, an outpatient dietitian, two per diem dietitians, two certified dietary managers, and thirty fulltime equivalents (FTEs) of hourly workers. It is an independently managed food service. The hospital is responsible for the food service to the patients as well as the staff. There are approximately five hundred hospital staff members and some visitors who dine in the cafeteria Monday through Friday for breakfast and lunch. There is a busy catering schedule for various meetings and educational programs. Approximately 25 percent of the food is prepared from scratch. The cooks roast their own beef and turkeys and make their own stews. Soups and puddings are canned.

The cafeteria features three entrées along with vegetables, salads, and desserts. The patient menus include regular, soft, pureed, mechanical soft, low residue, clear liquid, full liquid, diabetic, renal, renal diabetic, weight reduction, low-salt, low-cholesterol, and low-fat diets. Breakfast includes two hot cereals as well as cold cereals, two entrées, juice, fruit, and breakfast pastries. There is a selective menu for lunch and dinner that includes two entrées; two soups; and a variety of fruits, vegetables, and desserts with all the accessories to go with a wellbalanced meal.

After a prolonged and ongoing labor dispute, the nonmanagerial employees at Broadworth voted to go on strike. When the strike was announced, the members of the food service management team were not surprised. They had anticipated the possibility and made preliminary plans but were still nervous. The hospital administrators communicated to the food service managers that the remaining employees would receive free meals while on duty for all three shifts, seven days a week. Once the strike began, the cafeteria patronage dropped to about one hundred employees, which included management, physicians, medical residents, temporary employees, and nursing staff. All catering was placed on hold. The food service department purchased food from a variety of purveyors. Some purveyors continued to deliver food on schedule; others, such as the bakery company, were unionized and would not cross the picket line.

Many of the hospital floors were closed. The physical rehabilitation floor, psychiatric floor, emergency room, and a limited number of beds were available for telemetry, intensive care, medical—surgical, and orthopedic patients. Before the strike started, many of the patients were discharged or transferred to a sister hospital or an acute care hospital. When the strike started, there were approximately thirty patients in the hospital.

All members of the management team were notified when the strike was called. The team finalized its strike plans and buckled down for the long haul. The strike lasted nearly a month, and everyone was relieved when it was finally resolved.

Questions

 1. How can the food service operation be simplified to accommodate the strike by utilizing the small staff on hand? 

2. How can the food service management use the remaining staff to best serve the patients and fellow employees? (The management team, dietitians, and approximately six temporary, nonunionized employees were available.) 

3. What could the management team do to better prepare for the strike?

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