Management of Food and Nutrition Systems
Functions and frameworks
Expect questions on the management cycle - planning, organizing, staffing, directing, controlling - and on placing a task in the right phase. Planning sets goals; controlling compares performance with standards and takes corrective action. Distinguish leadership (vision, influence) from management (systems, control). Know classic motivators: Maslow's hierarchy, Herzberg's hygiene versus motivation factors, McGregor's Theory X and Y, and autocratic versus participative styles.
Money and people
Operating versus capital budgets, fixed versus variable costs, and variance analysis (actual minus budget; favorable or unfavorable depends on whether the line is revenue or expense). Labor is usually the largest controllable expense. Productivity measures include meals per labor hour, labor minutes per meal, and full-time equivalents, where 1 FTE = 40 hours per week or about 2,080 hours per year.
Quality, marketing, and risk
Continuous quality improvement cycles (plan–do–check–act), benchmarking, and customer satisfaction surveys. Marketing basics: product, price, place, promotion, plus customer segmentation. Risk management spans food safety, workplace safety, and financial controls.
Traps
Confusing headcount with FTE. Charging a capital purchase to a monthly operating budget. Forgetting that an unfavorable variance can be good news on the revenue side. Treating policy and procedure as synonyms - a policy is the guiding rule, a procedure is the steps that carry it out.
Worked example
Six part-time employees each work 20 hours per week: 120 total hours ÷ 40 = 3.0 FTE, despite a headcount of six. If the department serves 2,400 meals that week, productivity is 2,400 ÷ 120 = 20 meals per labor hour.