Funworld July 2010

by Keith Miller

Amusement park food and beverage has changed dramatically over the past few decades. Everything including what food is served, how it is prepared, what equipment is utilized, how restaurants are set up, how employees are trained, and what beverages are offered evolved considerably as food service operations became crucial profit centers for parks. FUNWORLD spoke with a few of the park industry’s longtime connoisseurs of cuisine to get their take on the seismic succulent shifts of the past 30 years.

Prepackaged Food
These culinary gurus say one of the most significant changes is the proliferation of prepackged foods—not just vending machine snacks or packaged foods sold in retail outlets, but foods used for meal preparation in park restaurants. Parks receive the foodstuffs from vendors, often in predetermined meal-sized portions, and the restaurants just remove the packaging, heat the food, and serve.

“When I started in the 1960s, very little was prepackaged,” says Bill Henninger, who retired in 2008 as executive vice president of Kennywood Entertainment Company and president of Kennywood Refreshment Company in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania. “Today there are many prepackaged foods. But in those days, everything was prepared from scratch, and we tried to do as much up-front cooking for showmanship so people could see it being prepared—I think that was the fun part.”

Don Risinger has similar memories of his early days in food and beverage. He spent 27 years with Six Flags and worked his way up to the corporate director of food service after starting out in 1965 as a 16-year-old busboy at Six Flags Over Texas. Now he works with the State Fair of Texas.

“Virtually nothing was prepackaged when I started,” he recalls. “My career started in the barbecue side at Six Flags Over Texas, and it was an old-fashioned brick pit with no thermostats or anything. We cooked it slowly for 12 hours, and it tasted great. Now the brisket is already cooked, and they immerse it in sauce and then ship it to the park, and the park just heats and serves it.”

There are those who are bucking the trend, however.

“Forty-eight years ago, almost 100 percent of [park food] was made from scratch; now, most of it is prepackaged almost everywhere, but not here,” says Poul Erickson, who has spent the past 35 years at Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, Denmark, and currently owns and operates the park’s Grøften restaurant, one of the best-known dining establishments in Denmark.

Grøften has stood the test of time, operating in Tivoli since 1874. The restaurant seats up to 650 people, and all receive Erickson’s hands-on service. “Every day we have 1,200 to 1,800 customers, and every day it’s all done à la carte,” he says. “It’s hard to find owners who are hands on, but that’s how you build up your customers. I guess I’m one of a dying breed.”

Though the loss of much of the “made-from-scratch” hand preparation is felt, Henninger says today’s higher peak attendance at parks is good reason for the move to prepackaging: “Kennywood is still very hands on, but if a park is being crushed by guests every day, it’s harder to do everything from scratch. When you have hordes of people all coming at the same time, you sometimes have to go with prepackaged to meet that demand.”

Practicality Names the Game
The move to fast food is not a phenomenon limited to U.S. parks. David Wright is one of the directors of Crealy Adventure Parks in Devon and Cornwall, England, and he says in the late 1980s, Crealy Devon began life as a small rural farm park. “We had a fair section, some farm buildings, and a nature walk to see the farm areas,” he recalls. “In its first year, we had 40,000 visitors; now we get 400,000.”

Wright notes he had “direct control” of food services in the park from 1991 to 1998 and had to make some big changes. “It was very amateur in the early days, and we weren’t dealing with the [big] numbers,” he observes. “Our Dragonfly restaurant was a waitress-service restaurant, and I had to change it to self-service because people wanted their food quickly. But they still wanted a quality food product, so we gave them a quality product.”

The park grew from one food outlet to seven, and though the service is fast, Wright says, “I’ve tried to bring back waitress service, but it’s never worked. Guests just don’t want to spend three quarters of an hour getting their food.” He’s also learned another advantage of self-service: “If guests can serve themselves, they feel less [restrained]; if they have to ask for something, they’re much less likely to buy it.”

“Today’s climate is all about driving bottom-line revenue,” adds Henninger. “There’s pressure on these guys today that we just didn’t have, and it prevents them from being able to do some experimenting. Funnel cakes have been popular for 25 or 30 years, but I remember building an operation around them and not knowing if they would be popular or not—we just hoped people would like them. I just hope the folks running everyday food service now continue to develop new foods like that.”

The greater emphasis on the bottom line has also increased the focus on statistics. “One big thing is that now you know exactly what you sell—pricing, sizes, and exactly how much people are buying—and how things are affected when you make changes,” says Risinger. “Communication is so much faster, and we have so much more information. Food profits are now critical to success, and having to do it with less staff.”

Water, Water Everywhere
Beverages have seen their share of dramatic changes over the years, as well. “Without question, one of the biggest shocks I saw in my career was the phenomenon that bottled water became,” exclaims Henninger. “When we had free drinking fountains all over the park, I was astounded to see people pay $2 for a bottle of water!”

Crealy has also experienced the bottled-water craze. “Exactly the same,” affirms Wright. “Our bottled-water business is massive, and I think that’s a consumer move to a healthier drink.”

Though the growth of exclusive contracts with beverage companies has allowed parks to realize a tidy profit from drink sales, these food experts say there is a down side in that it often restricts parks’ abilities to serve a variety of drinks, including popular in-park creations.

Mike Mason, who retired from Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, in 2008 as vice president of food service, says the bottled water phenomenon was so profound that four years ago, for the first time, water outsold soda at the park. But he says he learned another significant lesson about beverages: “What we put our products in became key. We developed some very unique beverage vessels, like a 44-ounce vessel for ‘Top Thrill Dragster’ we developed with Sippers By Design that was very unique, and we never would have had the sales we did had we not had those vessels. You can have the best, but it’s how it’s presented that really determines its success.”

Staffing, Safety, and Equipment Evolution
Mason began working at Cedar Point while in high school in 1960 with the inglorious job of cleaning garbage cans. He worked his way up to assistant manager of food operations, then left in the early 1970s to work at Worlds of Fun in Kansas City until the late 1980s. After doing consulting work in the early 1990s, he returned to Cedar Point in 1997 as vice president of food service. He’s now back in food services consulting work.

“The number-one change I saw over the years, which is the foundation to being successful, was training and personnel selection,” Mason says. “In the 1960s and ’70s, people were pounding on your door to work, but that changed and the numbers dwindled. So selecting the right people and training them was crucial. At Cedar Point, we became very good at training a seasonal employee. We implemented a 28-day field-training program, but all of that work took several years to develop.”

One area almost all of these food masters agree has seen marked improvement is food safety. “You have to conform to food service regulations in your region,” Henninger says. “The health departments are much more active today, and they have good standards in place.”

There is also almost unanimous agreement among these experts that the industry experienced enormous change in food service equipment. “We once had one item called a Steamro, and it had a water bath [underneath] that created steam,” says Mason. “One side of it heated hot dogs and the other side [warmed] the buns. Today, roller grills are used. All of the equipment has changed; the safety, the production capability, and the energy efficiency—all of those things have increased significantly.”

As for what’s coming next in park food service, Mason sees pricing pressures. “Pricing has gotten pretty steep, and I think the current economy is going to take years to turn around, so you may see different pricing strategies throughout the industry as parks come up with creative ways to address the pricing structure.”

Contact News Editor Keith Miller at kmiller@IAAPA.org.