Week 7 and 8

Virginia, one our kind co-workers, taught us how to enter nutrition information into Computrition before she left for her dietetic internship. This included entering ingredients, allergens, and nutrition facts. We were sad to see her go! 

Now is crunch time leading up to the opening of the Miller dining hall. We have been working hard to get organized and eliminate potential problems for the first week of opening. Chloe created order guides for all of the retail outlets at MSU for our distributor, FSA, to start bringing in products and for the managers to use for ordering. Alyssa began creating binders for each food station in Miller including printouts of their menus, recipes, temp logs, panning layouts, and much more. 

While our food service team members had a meeting, Chloe met with 2 of the brokers who represent General Mills- who is supplying the majority of the cereal used at all of the dining halls. We set up dispensers in the Hannon dining hall. They also brought a sample of Paul's favorite- Chocolate Chex! We had a very serious office meeting in our comfy new chairs with a cereal snack, courtesy of General Mills. 

Alyssa has been working with Randy, who represents the Stalk Market, a compostable food container company to switch out coffee cups and soup containers to compostable products. We got to meet him this week and test his products. We are excited to make a more sustainable move for MSU!

We took on another (safer) peak challenge this weekend. Hiking in Hyalite Canyon is always beautiful so we took the advice from Jeri, our information guru, to hike up to Hyalite Peak. There were 11 waterfalls along the way and the view from the top was well worth the work and grueling elevation gain. 

We also took an office camping trip in Hyalite. The first night was wonderful- complete with a nice fire, biking, and a delicious dinner made by Paul's wife. Her dutch oven skills were wonderful- she made onions/potatoes, ribs, salmon, veggies, and root beer spice cake and berry cobbler for dessert. With full bellies, we snuggled into our tents and within minutes, the rain began to fall. We managed to stay dry throughout the night. After cooking a delicious breakfast and huddling around the warm campfire, the fog crept in and the hail began to fall. Needless to say, we called it quits earlier than planned.