Jay Smith

Toby Awalt: Hello and welcome to Skip the Line, Mashgin's podcast on the tactics and technologies that deliver fantastic retail and food service experiences. I'm Toby Awalt, part of the Mashgin team. And today on the show, we have Jay Smith, Director of Operations at Chartwells Higher Education at Texas State University.

Hey Jay, welcome to the show.

Jay Smith: Hey, thanks for having me.

Toby Awalt: Really appreciate having you on today. Tell us about your role as Director of Operations at Texas State. What does that entail on like a day-to-day basis?

Jay Smith: Yeah, thanks. So I oversee all the dining on the Texas State University campus. We have multiple residential dining halls. We have retail outlets. We have coffee shops throughout the campus. We have convenience stores. And then on top of that, we also oversee all of the concessions and catering.

Toby Awalt: That is a huge domain of responsibility. Am I right in expecting it's like 300 to 500 staff? Like how many people are you managing?

Jay Smith: We're actually close to 600 right now. So we've got a lot of full-time employees. That's probably about 20 of our employees. And then the other 80% is student workers.

Toby Awalt: Man, 80% student workers. So you're in a constant hiring frenzy at the beginning of each year as those kind of retire into their regular careers.

Jay Smith: It's like a fresh start for us. So we do see a bit of turnover with our students, which is obviously to be expected. They're here to learn and move on. So we expect that every year. We do keep quite a few of our students though—they stay on with us all four years.

If they start with us as a freshman, they love working on campus. We have flexible hours and a perfect location for them in between classes. So we do see a lot of our students stay all four years and then see 'em graduate and go on to bigger and better.

Toby Awalt: Awesome. So you've got a pretty big variety of spaces, but let's talk about the campus as a cutout inside of the food service world. What do you see as needs that are different from other food service spaces when you're in service to students and teachers and adjuncts and people on campus?

Jay Smith: Yeah. Every year we do focus groups. We also do customer feedback surveys all throughout the year just to figure out what's important to them. The biggest thing that we hear about from our students is speed of service—every single year, it's speed of service that’s the biggest priority.

A lot of them are in between classes, so they might have 10 or 15 minutes to grab some lunch and scarf it down as they're walking to class or grab a snack or a soda. So really skipping the lines, ordering ahead of time—that's all really important to them on campus.

Toby Awalt: Fantastic. And your daily life today, what would you say are the top one or two challenges that recur year after year?

Jay Smith: Sure. Yeah. I guess my biggest challenge right now is also a big blessing for us: our university's seeing a tremendous amount of growth. So we've had record enrollment year over year. We're at about 40,000 students on campus right now. And about 7,000 of those are living on campus with us. Next year, we're opening a new dorm with another thousand students.

So we’ll be up to about 8,000 students living on campus. Just figuring out a way to continue feeding them without sacrificing quality or, again, speed of service—trying to refine our practices and figure out ways to feed all these students in a good, timely manner and feed 'em some good food.

So it's a good challenge for us to have.

Toby Awalt: Yeah, I bet. What, that's 25,000 meals a day trying to get across the line. Even with 600 people, that's a big task.

Jay Smith: It is.

Toby Awalt:So what would you say, with getting that much volume, what strategies have you developed to deal with that growth at the same time?

Jay Smith: Sure. Yeah. I guess optimizing our retail spaces has been big. We've been making a big push to move toward mobile ordering. Again, just anything we can do to get that speed of service up there. And then also just finding any spaces we have on campus. We're limited in our physical spaces that we have right now.

We are building a new dining hall, but that's coming online in 2027. So we've got a few years to handle this growth without that new dining hall. One of the things that we started this fall semester was we started bringing in a rotating group of food trucks. So they come in and they park on campus from about 10 in the morning until two in the afternoon.

They sell just during lunch, right outside of the quad. We built them some little platforms with power and water and everything for them. That's been great. That's really taken some pressure off of our residential dining halls and it gives the students something new to see every day.

So it is a rotating group. There's a new truck each day. Obviously they have their favorites, so we post the schedule, send the schedule out, and everyone loves the corn dog truck. Whenever we have corn dogs here on campus, they go crazy for it.

So it's good. I think it builds some excitement as well as alleviates some of the pressure points from our other buildings.

Toby Awalt: I bet that is wildly popular, and that's such a cool kind of activation for your students and definitely a great way to deal with it when you've got all of this growth in the university, and you may not necessarily have been given spaces yet to actually handle that growth. Bonus points for helping local businesses stay on their feet and get a great spot every day. I love that.

So Jay, I wanna go back in time a little bit to the beginning of your career.

The world where you might just be a GM or RDM entering that management phase for the first time. What are any hard lessons that stand out that you wish you could give advice to your former self—or advice that you see new managers struggle with today that you wish you could give to today's new leadership?

Jay Smith: Sure. I guess the biggest piece of advice is that you're not gonna have a one-size-fits-all solution to every problem. Every campus is gonna be different. Every client is different. Every customer is different. They all have their own different needs. So it's up to us to be able to respond to those and be able to cater to those needs individually.

A good example, I would say, is our contract used to fall under the vice president of finance on campus. And this past fall semester, we made a transition. So we fall under student success now, and specifically under housing.

They have much different needs and desires than our previous client. Obviously everyone always wants the best service for the students, but with housing, they've been very upfront about their needs and what they're looking to get—their goals on campus.

I guess one of their big ones is student retention. So every fall semester to the spring semester, we see about a 10% drop-off from freshmen living on campus. And then again, that number's even higher from first-year students to second-year students.

So we asked, how do we play a role in helping them achieve their goals as well? How can we pivot our business to help them get their retention levels up?

And so what we've done is we've pivoted to more of a student engagement model, where we're doing a lot of teaching kitchens and we're doing specialized, one-on-one tours of the campus with the chef. And they'll go around, introduce you to the campus chefs, let you try different foods that maybe you don't even know these concepts exist—you haven't seen them yet.

And it's all just to get these students more comfortable on campus and kind of get them in a better spot to continue their education on the Texas State campus rather than maybe withdrawing or transferring to another campus.

It's about building a community. So I think we've been really successful in pivoting to our new client's goals.
And then, on the same page, we do work in concessions and their priorities are a lot different. They're really looking for the best fan experience. So they're looking for low prices, fast service, and stuff to get their fans back in the seats so they're watching the game the whole time.

Yeah, their needs are a little bit different than housing's needs. So it is really—it's about knowing your client and knowing your customers and being able to pivot your business based on those needs.

Toby Awalt: Yeah, not everything's going to take a single solution, and being open to that in the first place will save you a lot of frustration as somebody who's new at it, getting into kind of the day-to-day.

So, rather than strategic lessons, is there anything that you've picked up as just a general operational tip that probably anybody could use in a dining space that would be helpful for them?

Jay Smith: Yeah, just going back to knowing the needs of your customers: talk to them. Don't try to guess what's important to them. That's a big thing.

We would open concepts—or in the past, we would open concepts—thinking, "Oh, we think this cuisine is going to do great." And maybe we weren't really tuned in to the students and seeing what's on trend with them at the time.

We've pivoted that now. So, we've got a new concept that we're hoping to open in the fall, and right now we're doing a kind of test launch. We're doing a two-week soft opening where we transition one of our other concepts into this new concept, see how it goes for two weeks, and get feedback—getting surveys from the students who eat there.

"What did you like? What did you not like? How was your experience eating there?" And we'll see if that's something that's going to be beneficial for them moving forward. So I guess the biggest thing is: don't think you know everyone's needs or wants—ask them. Find out what's important to them.

Toby Awalt: Yeah, I'd love to dig into that a little bit more because there's a nice practical piece here. Is there anything you've learned in administering those surveys? Is it more effective to use a QR code, or are paper ballots still the way you want to do it? What's been effective for you?

Jay Smith: Yeah, we do year-round surveys with QR codes. But just getting people to open up the survey is the biggest struggle. You can put signage out everywhere, but people walk right past it. They're not reading the bottom of their receipt to scan a QR code for the most part.

It's really about just getting out there and talking to them. "Hey, how was your meal today? Anything we could do better?” And then: "Oh, if you do have some suggestions, here's a QR code to take our survey. If you don't mind giving us some extra feedback."

But really, I think the best information we've gotten has come out of our in-person focus groups. And so we do those—we'll recruit from different demographics on campus too. We'll do it with faculty and staff. We'll reach out to some of our big catering clients who are always placing catering orders.

We'll get them in for a separate focus group and figure out not just what's important to the students, but what's important to the client, and what's important to all these different groups on campus. Faculty and staff may have different needs and wants than the students do as well. So yeah, those in-person focus groups have been the most beneficial. We get tons of great feedback from them.

Toby Awalt: Yeah, that's fantastic. And also I think it builds a lot of rapport with those groups in the school, right? Even just being asked can be a powerful thing—"Oh man, they actually care about me and what I think and my experience here." So even just giving them the opportunity to participate and put their feedback in—it creates a better system for everybody.

So moving out of the day-to-day and into the larger pieces of the industry, I'd love to understand if you've noticed any particular trends occurring in food service, especially in campus life.

That could be anything ranging from the format of concepts—like how they're designed—to types of food that are taking off, labor practices, anything you're seeing where you go, "Oh, this seems like a new tide."
And if you've noticed a trend, do you think it's going to stick around or is it temporary?

Jay Smith: I think mobile ordering has become a big one. We've had mobile ordering on this campus for probably about seven or eight years—we've had it for quite a while now—but really in the past year, it has just exploded. And I think a big portion of it is that it's easier and more user-friendly for students to order using their phones. Some of our busier locations, we've transitioned to a Grubhub Ultimate platform, where their phone is tied into everything.

They can order from a kiosk, they can come wait in line, but they can get the exact same menu, the same nutritional information, the same customizations, on their phone. They can get a text message when their order's ready. They can place their order while they're still in class. By the time they walk over to the building, they're just grabbing their food and going.

So I think the big trend is: they'll adapt to the technology as long as it's providing a service that's worthwhile to them. And I think that's where we may have struggled in the past—we had mobile ordering that was great for us (it freed up our cashier to then work on some other tasks), but there wasn't a huge incentive for customers to use it.

Now that we're tying it back into: "Hey, you can check the status of your order. You can see exactly how long the wait is going to be before you place your order. You can see which places are busy, what the volume is at each location at any point in time." Now that you're seeing more benefits for them, they're really taking off with it.

Our Chick-fil-A on campus, for example—we used to do maybe five to ten mobile orders a day.
Now we're seeing over 30% of our orders are mobile orders every single day.

Toby Awalt: Wow.

Jay Smith: Some days it's probably closer to 50%. And obviously that helps us out a lot. It really takes a lot of frontline pressure off of us because now we have people focused on getting orders out faster rather than standing at a register taking an order.

Toby Awalt: Yeah, and I imagine it also just makes the space nicer too, right? When you can load balance using that system so you don't get stuck in a big line—it doesn't feel as hectic.

Jay Smith: Yeah. And it really helps drive some of those people back to Chick-fil-A who may have not gone there lately. That was a big thing we heard from our focus groups, especially from the faculty and staff.

"I can't even go to Chick-fil-A. It's just so busy. It's got a line out the door every single day." Now they can sign in, place their order on their phone, walk downstairs, and just grab their food—or they know exactly how long it's going to take. So we've gotten really positive feedback from everyone on campus about mobile ordering and just any sort of frictionless technology.

Anything that's going to make their experience 30 seconds quicker goes a long way with them.

Toby Awalt: That adoption rate is huge, which makes sense—Chick-fil-A is so wildly popular that it would be the spot where people really make the commitment and get into mobile ordering.

So I hear you talking about adoption of mobile ordering and other technologies. Is there any other tech you’re seeing come up—either something you’re using now or have noticed elsewhere—that you're excited about entering the food service world?

Jay Smith: Sure. Yeah, I know that obviously we’re talking on a Mashgin podcast. We’ve had really good success with Mashgin.

We implemented a cashierless market at our football stadium this past year. At our bars, we sell over a dozen different types of alcohol—11 types of beer, liquor, margaritas, all kinds of stuff. So when you’ve got a big line and someone gets to the front, they often stop and look around for 45 seconds to a minute trying to make a decision. That was our pressure point—we knew we could serve them faster, but getting them through the line was the issue.

So, we built a little marketplace using an old fan shop that wasn’t being used anymore. We lined the walls with coolers and fit maybe 10 to 15 people inside at a time. Then we installed two Mashgin machines. The big benefit is that people don’t feel rushed while deciding. And if you already know what you want—say, a Bud Light—you can just walk in, grab it, walk straight to the Mashgin, and check out.

That bar has now become our most popular one at the stadium. I looked it up recently—our average transaction time across the entire season was under 14 seconds per person. People grab their drink, throw it on the machine, pay, and leave. It’s so fast. And it’s made for a much better fan experience. The biggest complaint we used to hear was that it took too long to get a drink—people were missing five or ten minutes of the game waiting in line. Mashgin has really helped us at concessions. In fact, it’s gone so well we’re building a second one now on the other side of the stadium for next season.

Toby Awalt: That’s fantastic. I’m really happy to hear you’re having a good experience. Fourteen seconds is fast—that’s basically just wallet-finding speed at that point. I’m glad it’s working so well.

Let’s talk a little more about Mashgin. One major benefit is the speed, obviously. The other is that it frees up staff—you can reallocate them. We touched on this with mobile ordering: it allows team members to focus on preparing and delivering orders instead of standing behind a register. Let’s expand on staffing more broadly. How have things been over the past few years? COVID disrupted everything—so what are your tactics now for finding and retaining great people?

Jay Smith: I think we’ve had a bit more success this past year with hiring. We’re getting more applicants, which gives us the chance to spend more time recruiting and really find the right people for the job.

A big factor that’s helped is planning. Our clients are great about giving us clear direction about where the university is heading. We know how many people will be on the meal plan next year. We know how many people we’re expecting on campus. That allows us to plan ahead. We’re not scrambling to fill positions tomorrow—we’re thinking about roles we’ll need a year from now. We’re developing people who’ll be ready to take on bigger roles two years from now.

We know that new dining halls are coming online, so we’re hiring new culinary staff now to prepare them for running those buildings in the future. That forward planning has helped a lot.

And when a position opens, we’ve got people who can step in temporarily while we search for the best fit. For example, our most recent chef hiring—we left that position open for over a month. We brought in a dozen candidates from across the state. Each one did a chef test. They came in, cooked for us, and we interviewed them. We weren’t desperate to fill the role—we were determined to find the right person. That breathing room made a huge difference.

We’ve also been working on building bench strength, so that when we do have an opening, we already have people ready and excited to step into those roles.

Toby Awalt: That’s huge. Even just getting ahead of it at all is probably really hard to start—but once you’re doing it, it makes everything else easier to maintain.

So on the retention side, you talked a bit about training people into those future roles. Do you have any advice for spotting that talent early or encouraging people to commit to growing into the next level?

Jay Smith: We really look for people who want to grow. That’s the biggest thing.

If someone has the desire, they can learn new skills. They can learn the job. Managing the back of house—ordering, inventory, all of that—we can teach. But we’re looking for the personality who’s willing to learn, willing to adapt, and eager to take on new responsibilities. That’s what we focus on when we’re looking to promote hourly employees into supervisor or management roles.

It all starts with their attitude. The rest can be taught. The rest of it will come into play.

Toby Awalt: Yeah, you’ll notice people who are trying to improve or do better. From there, you can elevate them and give them the opportunity to keep growing.

So, we’ve talked about two line-busting technologies: mobile ordering and Mashgin. Is there anything else in your toolkit for when lines get big? As the university keeps expanding, you’re inevitably going to have more people than you have capacity for. Any other tricks up your sleeve to keep lines short?

Jay Smith: Yeah. Really, just making our operations as efficient as possible. If we can crank out the food, there's not gonna be a line. It is really looking at where those pressure points are.

So, we had a burger concept where it took a long time for people to order. We had one person taking orders. They're having to write down everyone's order, and then from there, their food is coming out in no time. We can crank out burgers like an assembly line. So it's not—the pressure point was the ordering system.

That burger concept is actually located in one of our marketplaces, and so it really looked bad when we had a big line because the marketplace looked so full of people. You've got everyone standing around everywhere waiting to order, and then it scares people away from coming in to buy just a bag of chips or a drink. They're seeing 10, 20 people in line, and they think, "I don't really want to go wait in that line to buy a can of Pringles. I'm maybe gonna go to the vending machine and get something out of there instead."

So what we did is we started implementing—again pushing for—mobile ordering. By doing that, we brought in Grubhub Ultimate kiosks, where they were placing their order on kiosks, and we located those kiosks outside of the marketplace.

Now if you want to come order in person, great, you can come order at a kiosk. Or you can order on your phone, which is gonna be quicker, faster, easier for everyone. Either way, your food's gonna come out in the same amount of time, but it really just cleared out all that room in the marketplace.

Now we're seeing our sales in that marketplace go up, because one: you're not having theft. If there's a ton of people standing in there and you can't see what's going on on your floor, stuff’s walking out. It happens inevitably, but when you clear out that marketplace area, now you don't have people waiting for their food in there anymore.

They're getting a text message when their food is ready. So all they're doing is walking in, grabbing their food, and leaving. It really clears out so much room. And it makes a better work environment too for our cashiers. They're able to stock the shelves during the day when they couldn't before. It used to be: stock in the morning, and if your shelf gets empty throughout the day, it's too crowded in there to get in and refill it.

So now—it really helped us on a few different levels. But it's just identifying where those pressure points are. For other concepts, it’s the kitchen that’s a little bit slower. And maybe we're making food to order, and every single item is customized, and that's what's slowing us down.

So we look at that when we're developing new concepts too. Like, for example, the one that we're developing—we want it to have some really good options where people can just choose an option off the menu, and they're gonna be happy with it how it comes. They're not gonna want to make a ton of customizations to it, because those are all things that slow down the line.

So really looking at that when we're developing new concepts, but also to optimize our existing ones as well.

Toby Awalt: Finding the choke point and eliminating it—it seems like not only does it reduce the line, but I’m impressed that it created more space for students to go enjoy their day not being in line. And it improved your actual shrink issues by lowering the collective site busyness. That’s a really cool effect.

And it sounds like sales did go up. I imagine that’s probably true in most situations where you're able to cut down lines—you see some increase in overall consumption. Is that true?

Jay Smith: Yes, absolutely. The units that we've transitioned to Grubhub Ultimate—we've done it with our busiest retail units on campus. So that’s Chick-fil-A, Einstein Brothers, Panda Express, Dunkin’ Donuts—our bigger retail brands.

We’ve transitioned to Grubhub Ultimate, and with each one, we’ve seen at least a 25% increase in sales since transitioning. And again, a lot of that is mobile orders and just making it easier for people to order online. So you're really not seeing the big lines. You're not seeing a big crowd at those locations anymore, but you are seeing the throughput. So it's really nice.

Toby Awalt: Yeah, it's just being able to capture the demand, right? Lines are a constant deterrent. And however you attack that, it almost always opens up the opportunity for people who want the food to go get it.

Now, we did talk about you being a Mashgin customer, and you're designing a second concept right now. Since this is a Mashgin podcast—and hopefully our listeners know who we are—I’d love to get some of your opinions on what you've done to make implementing Mashgin better.

Simple places to start—what did you do to make it easier for customers to adopt, and for your staff to adopt this type of technology?

Jay Smith: Sure, yeah.

To make it easier for customers, we’ve done a few things. Our Mashgin might not look like a Mashgin at University of Texas. We have very campus-specific branding on everything. Our marketing department does a great job of making signage for it that really helps streamline the process for our customers.

At the beginning of the semester, people see a new technology and they might be standing in line and there's—there might be a cashier at a POS on one side of the room and a Mashgin on the other. And they think, "I don't know what that machine is, so maybe I'm gonna stay away from it because I don't want to be embarrassed if I walk up and don't know how to use it." So they wait at the cashier.

We try to ease that concern, especially for first-year students. We make a big push in the fall semester to have a cashier standing out by the Mashgin, just kinda showing people how to use it, showing people how convenient it is and how quick it is. And that’s gonna sell them on it.

If you make it easier and show the customer that it's easier and more painless to use, they're gonna go back to it every single time.

Out at the stadium, I can guarantee you—our very first game of the season, we probably were not under 14-second ticket times. We might’ve been at 25-second ticket times, 'cause everyone’s trying to figure out what this new technology is.

But by the second game, we were seeing our sales in that store were like doubled. Everyone knew what they were doing. They’re just streaming in, grabbing their product, putting it on the machine, paying, and leaving. And it is so quick.

So really, just showing them the benefit of it does all the work for you at that point. After they know how to use it and they see how quick it's gonna be—they're sold on it.

Toby Awalt: That's fantastic. I'm really glad to hear that.

Alright, that is it for questions from us. Jay, thank you so much for being on the show. Really appreciate having you here, and I look forward to sharing this with the wider community. I hope they get to learn a bunch from your insights.

Jay Smith: Yeah. Thank you so much, Toby. It was a pleasure chatting with you.

Toby Awalt: Appreciate it, Jay.

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