“Excellence” is a word anyone would use to describe the experience of dining at Westminster-Canterbury of the Blue Ridge. But did you know that for several years, our dining services partner FLIK Hospitality Group has officially designated WCBR as a Center for Excellence (CFE)?

That means a lot more than a mere word. It means not only that our Dining Services division has served as an example for others to emulate, but also as a place to which they come to learn to be excellent themselves.

FLIK explains the CFE designation as meaning that an operation “represents the very best of all that FLIK has to offer.” A CFE “is in pursuit of excellence each and every day,” and achieves it. Such a center not only delivers “a superlative dining experience for our customers and clients,” but also:

• Develops and shares best practices.
• Acts as a national and regional training site.
• Serves as a research location for the collection of trends and consumer data.
• Establishes sector benchmarks for operational and financial performance.
• Functions as a pilot site to evaluate new concepts, programs, and innovations from specific sectors.
• Hosts regional and national meetings and events.
• Showcases the best of what Compass Group, the company of which FLIK is a part, offers.

Being a CFE means demonstrating excellence every day. To maintain that status, our Dining Services not only hosts managers and staff from other sites and sends out our folks to train people in other locations, but also gets audited in person four times a year – which is a very stringent process. It means we must check all the boxes on a wide range of measurements of quality.

When new director of Dining Services started here in February, he found that his staff was a “super-good, super-skilled team.” The team was producing “really good results,” he said on this blog after he had been here a short while.

Now, Jesse and his team are working hard to continue our CFE status. So you might see some visitors on our campus in coming days. They’re here to see what a Center for Excellence looks like.