Food, Hospitality & Wellness ‘Places’ Transcending the Resources & Mining Village Work-Life Experience

Source: www.food-management.com

Food, Hospitality & Wellness ‘Places’ Transcending the Resources & Mining Village Work-Life Experience

Future Food has been working directly with several mining companies in the mining and resources sector for over four years to reimagine food, hospitality and wellness in design driven spaces for an ever-diversifying workforce that has high expectations of their remote village life.

From humble beginnings working with BHP to objectively review their F&B partners food and hospitality service standards, modernise the food scope and consult as the independent F&B SME through their tender process, we have moved on to assembling a team of Architects and Engineers to reimagine and deliver a new remote work life experience with a modern food and design vision.

Future Food’s vision with BHP was to translate the local high street F&B experience - the marriage of food, hospitality and design – into remote villages initially by reimagining the dining room (Drymess) and tavern (Wetmess) functional spaces into modern ‘places’ reflective of what village residents would experience in their local high street, minimising the inevitable disassociation or ‘culture shock’ with their work and home life.

Source: Future Food

Food and hospitality services provide an opportunity to support relatable or ‘normal’ daily interactions, offering 3-5 critical daily touchpoints that elevate the standard of the workplace village experience through modern design and the provision of food and hospitality that supports wellness. Health and safety are paramount in mining and resources sector but as with society in general, personnel ‘wellness’ has not always been at the forefront of consideration. Daily productivity, physical health and employee turnover are often tied into employee’s wellness in the workplace and factors that can support and improve wellness translate to improved profitability through reduced accidents/injury, reduced absenteeism, higher productivity and higher workforce retention rates.

Through the course of Future Food’s food, hospitality and design journey over the past four years, the mining and resources working landscape has confronted issues of wellbeing, not only with COVID but the continued focus on the individual health and safety of FIFO workers while at remote villages. Future Food responded to those changes with further recommendations on not only the design of the new modern and inclusive dining and tavern spaces but on their intent, assessing their ongoing social value as concepts in totality of remote village work life. As we look at these spaces, tied to the history and ‘traditional’ culture of mining & resources and reconsider from a modern 2022 perspective, we argue that a clean slate with no preconceptions, would conceptualise and masterplan a completely different holistic village design that focuses on creating a customer (FIFO worker) centric design.

Source: Future Food

The purpose of customer centric holistic village design solution is to promote a sense community – normalised ‘places’ that encourage positive social behaviours and interactions which have the potential
to reach out to a high percentage of the village population and in so doing, create opportunity for
improved wellness.

While Future Food are at the forefront of food, hospitality and disruptive ideation as a subject matter expert in the hospitality sector for over 30 years, we acknowledge and understand that in this complex village environment, strong service partners are required to deliver the food and hospitality services in addition to other facilities management services. However, our experience has seen a continued gap in leadership, knowledge and consistent execution of best practice food and hospitality across the mining and resources sector from catering service providers to meet the current contractual requirements and unfortunately, we have yet to see any demonstrated capability for providers to make a step change to future requirements.

The focus from catering providers continues to look backwards to the old process driven ‘back of house’ paradigm where food safety, workplace health & safety, logistics, kitchen processes, supply chain, human resources/recruitment and compliance were the selling points to clients with less focus for the ‘front of house’ – customer centric – consistent delivery of a quality, relevant well-presented and diversified food and hospitality service. The 70% BOH food preparation process gets near 100% of the catering service providers focus with no resources directly allocated to and accountable for the last 30% food presentation in dining rooms, every day, every service period - the customer moment of truth.

Catering companies sought to differentiate themselves on the strength of the 70% BOH food preparation processes, however the general level of capability across the sector has progressed to a point where even medium size players have equivalent and perhaps even more agile processes, systems, software and hardware eliminating any significant point of difference. The challenge moving forward into a new paradigm with the FIFO worker at the centre of the equation (the actual customer), as opposed to the client(s), is how these companies will restructure their businesses to realign their efforts to the 30% FOH food presentation focus and deliver a modern, consistent food and hospitality experience. The resistance to change has been palpable over several consulting engagements, as the old guard push back in attempt to stick to what they know and not be held financially accountable for delivering the final 30%, which requires a seemingly disproportionate amount of resources.

Here in lies the misalignment, most national and multinational catering service providers are not sufficiently financially motivated on the transparent front end of the contract with the client to provide a modern, diversified food and hospitality experience. Rather catering service providers are incentivised in an opaque, internally driven process to funnel a limited range of food and beverage (with minimum required standards) in high volume to generate maximum supplier rebates. Head chef’s, site managers, operations manager, general managers and directors are all aligned and incentivised to deliver maximum potential rebates. We have yet to see an overriding KPI that puts FIFO satisfaction with food and hospitality first.

Under a scenario where mining and resources companies sufficiently incentivise catering service partners to place FIFO worker satisfaction as the real barometer of successful delivery of food and hospitality, service providers would quickly realign their interests and seek to deliver genuine benchmark food and hospitality.

Ultimately, these modern, designed ‘places’ need an equally forward-thinking food and hospitality service provider that can transcend the everyday experience and deliver on the promise of modern, relevant, authentic and diversified food and hospitality experiences. This supports FIFO worker wellness, has obvious and significant financial implications for mining and resources companies and would provide the point of difference for a catering service provider to position themselves ahead of the pack.

Source: Future Food