Gone are the days of that perfect storm: overstuffed meeting-goers and under-appreciated PowerPoints – the dreaded four-course corporate lunch.
“Health and wellness is here to stay,” says Wyndham Hotels & Resorts F&B Director Mark Anderson. “It might be cliché, but the millennial world is real and the expectation among that demographic is a much lighter, health-conscious meal.”
“Millennials are generation nice,” The New York Times once declared. Organic, sustainable and veggie-friendly options feed the millennial mindset dominating the modern corporate meeting, which has also been forced to prioritize those with alternative food needs. Vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, nut allergies – rather than view these groups as the exception, many hoteliers have started angling their group meetings around these options, which skew toward healthier, plant-based items.
And it isn’t just what you eat, but how you eat it. Experiences – and the Instagram photos they inspire – lately dominate any meeting worth its salt, both actual and proverbial. Snipping fresh greens for a salad. Handrolling fresh sushi. A yogurt parfait slurped down following morning yoga.
“Five years ago it was typical that lunch was three or four courses: a pre-set, heavier appetizer, a very heavy entrée with a starch that overwhelmed the plate, followed by a pastry,” Anderson says. “Everyone left that luncheon feeling like they wanted to go take a nap. That world has changed.”
For the meeting-centric Dolce Hotels & Resorts, which Wyndham acquired in 2015, the focus has been around nourishment “hubs,” with the idea being to offer healthy options strategically throughout the day, giving meeting-goers options instead of limiting their snacking to certain blocks of time.
“We look at that whole day-long meeting experience. We’re serving a lighter breakfast, we’re serving a lighter lunch, and then we’re giving you this nourishment hub in the afternoon that features lighter foods so that people, if they want to nosh all day, don’t feel like they want to run out of the hotel and go to sleep.”
And the sleeping is a real issue, according to a 2016 study commissioned by Hilton. Out of a sampling of U.S., German and British workers, some 39% of meeting attendees reported falling asleep or feeling drowsy during a meeting.
Creating meetings that didn’t send attendees to dreamland was part of what inspired Hilton to create its “Meet with Purpose” meetings in 2015, a pilot program among some 40 Hilton hotels that included options pairing yogurt and yoga, instructor-led routines with healthy snacks, and Cut and Create, a salad bar that encourages guests – like some health-frenzied Edward Scissorhands – to snip their own greens tableside.
The ‘Aha’ moment
Cut and Create was popularized by Philip Thompson, executive chef at the Capital Hilton in Washington, D.C. But it was the moment people started taking out their phones to post pictures of their co-workers harvesting salad that Hilton Director of B2B Marketing Toni Zoblotsky says she knew the hotel was onto something.
“That was the immediate ‘aha’ moment, the – oh my gosh, people are taking pictures and putting this on Instagram,” she says. “Now it’s got to the point where, if people are not taking pictures of the food, you feel defeated.”
This year, Hilton dropped the pilot, instead encouraging all hotels to riff on their own versions of healthy meeting offerings while still using the Meet with Purpose brand (For instance, Hilton Chicago Oak Brook has opted to focus on micro-greens via its “Living Salads” offering).
In terms of ROI, Zoblotsky says the Meet with Purpose packages are comparable to Hilton’s published meeting menu prices. For Yoga and Yogurt, the yogurt parfait is similarly priced to a catering option and a hotel will contract the yoga instructor, with the instructor’s rate then passed on to the client.
Rolling out wellness
After the success of cooking classes in the hotel’s Japanese restaurant Zentan, the sales and marketing team at Washington, D.C.’s Kimpton Donovan decided to add to its meeting offering a sushi-rolling class with the restaurant’s head chef Yo Matsuzaki.
Mark Robertson, area director of sales and marketing for Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, says the sell on such an experiential option can sometimes be tricky – planners can be reluctant, often unsure whether the time spent rolling out sushi will be a worthy deviation from a brainstorming session.
“When it comes to these discussions, I try and put it in terms of an ROI on meeting value. We know, in our experience doing meetings, that breaks are very, very important in terms of the entire meeting’s success,” Robertson says.
“But what they get out of the meeting, having had (the sushi rolling), is an openness with each other and they end up getting a lot more out of the whole meeting,” he continues. “So that adds to the experience overall of interacting with their colleagues in a different way.”
And, Robertson says, Kimpton Donovan has used the sushi rolling opportunity to book meetings with groups that were new to the hotel or who might have been initially hesitant to commit to an entire spread built around Japanese food. The ROI has come, not just out of the cost of the added experience, but through booking more events at the hotel.
“That was a surprising effect that it had. We thought it would be more of an add-on opportunity, but it’s actually driven conversion rate,” Robertson says.
Keen on green
In September, Frankfurt-based Deutsche Hospitality’s Steigenberger brand expanded its Green Meetings program to include all its hotels, following a 13-hotel pilot program.
The group’s commitment to being environmentally friendly during its meetings ranges from offering organic snacks produced by regional farmers and sustainable fair trade beverages, to using local, seasonable, and sustainable items whenever possible (i.e., local Belgian cheese and smoked salmon from sustainable Scottish fish stocks).
Another focus is the green meetings’ drinking water, which is filtered and prepared at Steigenberger’s own water-processing facilities and included in the cost of the green meeting conference package. The water is provided in reusable glass bottles and, in self-bottling, the group avoids the environmental waste of packing materials and transport emission.
Meetings have also been declared “climate neutral” in terms of CO2 emissions by the German-based, non-profit climate protection organization Atmosfair. Additionally, a number of Steigenberger hotels are accredited by the ISO 14001 environmental management system, which means even something as small as the napkins used at meetings must be free of chlorine and contain at least 30% renewed paper.
But it’s not easy to go green overnight. Challenges have included substantial restructuring in addition to getting staff on board the green machine.
“Concerning the employees, the green meeting topic is very complex, requiring continued communication and sales training,” says Urban Denk, director culinary innovation and development.
Ultimately, Denk says he sees the meetings driving employees to be motivated by a good cause.
“Every staff member needs to be able to tell his own little story about green meeting. It is a large project, which has to be supported and lived by all employees,” Denk says.
See related sidebar: F&B: Meetings of the future