Gabe Aiello, Director of Product and Business Development attended SNIC this year with Regional Sales Director, David Dittlinger. This conference is a great place to get the drift of where things are headed in School Nutrition and take the pulse of industry participants at the same time. Updates regarding regulation and guidance changes, the politics behind it and input from operators is always fascinating and it informs our thinking and planning for the following year.

This year’s conference provided some of the most stimulating presentations by gifted speakers, like futurist, Christian Crews, who provided the audience with the opportunity to envision the future through game playing designed just for school nutrition, conducted at each table. Our takeaway was that PCS should think seriously of applying robotics to School Nutrition, as many of our budding futurists saw cafeterias populated with amazing robots that will cleverly provide solutions to problems we only now have an inkling of.

Generational research expert and millennial, Jason Dorsey opened our eyes to the importance of an understanding of generational differences and how it can be applied to every area of our operations, from decision makers, mostly Baby Boomers and some Gen-X to new employees and Parents of students now in school, mostly Millennials, and so on. For example, we learned that Gen-X’ers love email and that Millennials communicate mostly by text and will only read the subject line of emails, and hate to be interrupted by a phone call. This explains a lot!

The PCS marketing team and department heads collaborated to see the best way to communicate more effectively with our customers based on these findings. We discovered that almost 2/3 of our website traffic is coming from mobile devices. Having anticipated this, we already have a mobile friendly website and are currently developing mobile applications for many of our products.