by Karel Juhl
Jerry Fournier may not be a traditional restaurateur, but the new president of the Michigan Restaurant Association holds traditional customer service values. Active in the MRA since 1978, Fournier has served on the board since 1982.

The executive vice president of HDS Services brings to his new position over 35 years of food service experience, primarily in healthcare and other non-traditional settings. Add a dash of hands-on private club and hotel work, blend in a mess sergeant's training and practical experience, and you have a president well prepared to lead (to say nothing of being able to feed a thousand hungry people). Michigan Restaur-ateur spoke with Jerry Fournier about the task that lies before him:

Has food service always been in your cards?
I actually enrolled in Michigan State University as a pre-dentistry major. I was having a problem with chemistry, didn't really like it, and the resident advisor knew something was wrong. I told him I was supposed to be a dentist, it was all my parents ever talked about, and now I realized I couldn't be and didn't want to be.

He encouraged me to go to an introductory class with him at MSU's School of Hospitality Business. I thought it sounded interesting, and I enrolled. Because I needed practical experience in this program, during school I worked first as a coat checker and then a bellman at the Kellogg Center, and that first summer I got a job as a waiter at the Meadowbrook Country Club in Northville.

When did you decide to go into institutional food service?
Bill and Lois Triplett were members of Meadowbrook. At the time, Mr. Triplett was an excutive for a major foodservice management company. I worked at Meadowbrook all four summers and, after he got to know me, he confided in me that he was going to start his own company. He said I should think about joining him. I was interested in club management, and when I found out his new company was more institutional and non-commercial, I wasn't really interested. But I took the interview with John H. King, Jr. He was the Food Service Director of Triplett’s new company’s 5th Account, Providence Medical Center in Southfield, Michigan. King encouraged me to take the job, saying it would be a great opportunity. Little did I know, John H. King, Jr., President of HDS Services, would be my boss and mentor for the next 32 years. And that's how it started.

You've been with HDS for 32 years and are an executive vice president, yet you still hit the road to call on clients. Isn't that awfully time-consuming?
Client contact has been a core value of HDS. Besides Mr. Triplett, there are four officers at our corporate office in Farmington Hills. Three of the four officers divide the list of 250 clients and one of us sees each client every year. We take their temperature, see how they feel about the food and hospitality services we're providing. That's in addition to the people in operations who are directly involved with meeting with our customers and working with the management and hourly staff. We also go into the kitchens and cafeterias and talk to the cooks, the cashiers and the dishwashers. We try to make it very personal.

Of our 250 accounts, we've sold our services to each administrator one at a time. Unlike other companies, we've never gobbled up a company with 50 accounts and added them through acquisition. We’ve done it all one by one.

How do you put your master sergeant training to work?
The MSU School of Hospitality Business involves a lot of classroom work. In this four year program, you can't possibly graduate with adequate culinary skills – so I went in the National Guard and became a mess sergeant. That's where I learned large quantity cooking, in charge of a mess hall that feeds 1,000 people. I went through the U.S. Army food service school at Fort Knox, which was a very good school to learn cooking.

You've been on the MRA board a long time.
I think I'm the longest-serving board member the MRA has ever had. I've been on the board since 1982, but it seems like yesterday; I still remember my first meeting. Mr. Triplett, who was also active in the association, felt it was a good opportunity to network and meet people. He was the one who pushed me to get involved, and so in 1978 I did.

Why is it important to be involved?
The MRA provides a lot of very good programs for its members, and it's important to have members involved who are helping create those programs and determining the strategic plan and direction the Association takes to further help the members.

There are a lot of people I've met, people we've hired over the years that I wouldn't have met and wouldn't have been able to hire if we hadn't been involved. Also, because our company is not a traditional food service operation – though we do have some very fine, gourmet dining rooms – our involvement with the Michigan Restaurant Association reinforces that HDS is committed to quality and hospitality, and not just institutional food service.

What would you like to accomplish during your term?
I'd like to continue to grow the membership. We have 1,800 or 1,900 members, and we've had the goal for some time to reach 2,000. I really believe the programs are very worthwhile for restaurateurs to join, but we obviously need to market those programs more so restaurateurs see the benefit in them.

I also believe there are a lot of affiliated people and organizations that could be members and aren't. Private club managers and dietitians, for example. I represent the non-commercial side of the business: food service for corporations, private schools, long term care, hospitals, retirement facilities. Each of those food services has a department head, but very few of those people realize the restaurant association can also provide them benefits. Being the first non-commercial president I hope will be enlightening to other people in the industry, that they can gain from being a part of the association.

Back to HDS for a moment. Your original interest was private club management, but is what you're doing now really so far from that?
A lot of the principles in the private club industry apply in our business. We still have to motivate the kitchen and front of the house staff. If you're going to be successful in a club, you have to go and speak to the customer (members). In our business we still need to get out and talk to the people who are eating our food (our customers), and see what they think.

One of our company's core values is total quality management. When you ask what quality is, people start describing something that's so big you can't understand it. Our definition of quality is simply exceeding the customer's expectations. Talk to your customer, and you can tell relatively easily if you've exceeded their expectations.

If you say "it's just hospital food" or "it's just a cafeteria in an office building," that's all it will be. But if you want to make the dining experience more upscale and add programs to enhance it, you can make any institutional environment more like a restaurant. Which is also another benefit to being a part of the restaurant association.

Are you still having fun?
Oh, absolutely! That's one of the benefits HDS offers. We're a large corporation and, while we all work a lot of hours, there's enough structure that you're not working every holiday or every weekend. Some people refer to us as a contract management business, but it is a business where the hours are much better than they would typically be if you worked for a resort or restaurant. I have enough free time when I want it.

And how do you spend that free time?
My wife Joanne and I have been married for 25 years. We have a cottage on Lake Huron, in Port Sanilac and we’ve gone up there to relax since 1972. I get into flowers, water sports, golf, and I smoke an occasional cigar. I also had the time to be with my children when they were growing up, which I think is very important. (His son is a Michigan State University graduate, and his daughter is finishing her sophomore year there.)

Any final thoughts?
I feel particularly honored being selected as the president of the MRA, considering that I've come from a non-traditional side of the business. I'm going to work very hard to continue to promote and grow the Association, and to build on the successes that have been accomplished by my predecessors.