Students met with Serena Markanen, manager of Food and Nutrition at Legacy Salmon Creek. Markanen offered an overview of the retail side (Terrace Café and Creekside Café & Espresso Stand) and the patient side of the hospital’s food services, which serve about 25,000 meals each month. She highlighted ongoing improvements in management, menu planning and supply ordering. Many of the changes are tied to the hospital’s use of Lean management techniques.
The new WSU-Vancouver program offers bachelor degree coursework in management, marketing, sales and operations in the hospitality field – including hotels, restaurants and tourism. The hospitality program on the Pullman campus began in 1932 and is the third oldest program of its kind in the nation. The WSU-Vancouver program began in the fall of 2013 and is the only bachelor’s degree program in hospitality in the Portland metropolitan area.
“We’ve had WSU-Vancouver engineering students visit in the past, for a demonstration of one of our surgical robots, and we sponsor WSU-Vancouver’s annual Chancellor’s Seminar Series,” said Brian Willoughby, spokesman for Legacy Salmon Creek. “We’re good neighbors in Salmon Creek, always looking for new ways to collaborate.”
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