Colorado State likes Premier smoothie concept; natural fruit, sweeteners
Colorado State University is one of our nation's leading research universities with world-class research in infectious disease, atmospheric science, clean energy technologies, and environmental science. It was founded in 1870 as the Colorado Agricultural College, six years before the Colorado Territory became a state. Last year, CSU awarded degrees to more than 5,000 graduates, and this year, it attracted nearly $300 million in research funding. Colorado State is a land-grant institution and a Carnegie Doctoral/Research University-Extensive. www.colostate.edu/
Situation:
Colorado State University Dining Services opened its first smoothie bar about two years ago when the Ram’s Horn, a new student dining facility, opened. The smoothie bar used a premixed product that was high in sugar and quite expensive.
Solution:
Late last winter, Deon Lategan, director of Dining Services, who chairs the Premier healthcare alliance Colleges and Universities Committee, learned about Premier’s new smoothie program as part of the new Premier Foodservice Retail Concepts Solutions. “What appealed to us particularly was that it has all natural ingredients,” Lategan said. “It’s sweetened with grape juice rather than corn syrup and sugars.”
Lategan invited Premier to do an on-campus tasting for students in March 2009. “We received rave reviews,” he said, “particularly because it is all natural, 100 percent fruit. We were sold.”
Result:
“It has worked very well for us. Product costs went down, and they are already carried by our prime vendor, U.S. Foodservice, so we don’t have to special order anything,” Lategan said. The previous product had to be ordered by the pallet to get a reasonable price which caused stock rotation issues.
“With the Premier smoothie program, the products come right off of our prime vendor’s truck, and we get deliveries multiple times a week so we don’t have inventory issues,” Lategan noted. “The fruit comes in bulk, not retail packs, and that helps keep costs down. We break bulk cases down into smaller batches and pull out of the freezer as we need them.”
Simple recipes also appealed to Lategan. Typically, retail operations don’t have highly skilled employees. To get consistent drinks time after time, recipes must not be very complex; they need to be easy to make quickly.
“We feel Premier’s smoothie program fits the bill perfectly because we use college student labor predominately,” he said. “The recipe is picture-based. You use so many scoops of this, so many scoops of that; you put it in a blender and you press a button; and you pour it.”
Dining Services just opened a second location in CSU’s newly renovated and enlarged Rec Center on campus. The center has a climbing wall that’s a replica of Horsetooth Rock, a prominent landmark near Fort Collins and often used as a symbol of that city.
“It’s hugely popular, and the smoothie bar is right beside it,” he said.”There’s a national chain smoothie bar just up the road. The Rec Center chose us. We think it’s going to do very well for us.”
"What we received from Premier was a graphic template, and we added our
information. The graphics are superb, really high resolution, and were very easy
to work with. We blew them up and added our information. It looks like the
graphics are home grown."
Deon Lategan Director of Dining Services Colorado State University, Fort
Collins, CO