May 16, 2013

Putting the team back together

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Vertex asked if we wanted to join our friends Roxy’s and Momogoose to cater lunch for all their 1200+ employees. We needed to serve 400+ people in under 1.5 hours. Even for us, this required an insane level of throughput (that’s about 6 chickpea fritters/minute).

Ayr said, there’s no way we’ll be able to do this unless we have the fastest crew ever. So Ayr assigned all of corporate and management to work stations on the truck. Vincenzo (manager of trucks) worked fryer. Chris (manager of restaurants) ran oven. Sara (MIT truck manager) worked BBQ station. John (finance) and Joey (chef’s assistant) worked drinks. And I worked chickpea station with Rolando (chef) and Pedro (best soup-maker at Clover). Megan (HR) managed the line (which got to be 80 deep at the height of lunch).

I hadn’t gotten to work side by side with everyone since…maybe never! I think I read something about how In-n-Out does this for all their new location openings. And we had a ton of fun giving each other a hard time, working really really fast, and hopefully banging out some amazing food. If you were in that line, tell us what you thought of everything. If you manage an office and think it might be fun to have Clover serve lunch, reach out.

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