By John Rippingham and Adrienne Wong.
Strategic Insight:
Onboarding a new food service provider in a residential boarding school isn’t just about contracts and kitchens—with Ovation Hospitality, it’s also about culture, care, and community. Success begins with aligning the provider’s values with the school’s ethos, especially around student wellbeing and hospitality standards. Ovation’s Business Manager, John Rippingham, outlines the process.
Practical Tips: Onboarding Plan - Setting the Table for Success
A structured onboarding plan ensures your new provider integrates smoothly into the boarding school environment. We recognise every school is different and this helps us shape a solution that suits each school. Here’s a practical roadmap:
- Stakeholder Briefings: We kick off with a cross-functional meeting involving house staff, business managers, and student reps. This is an opportunity to listen to your needs, set expectations and build shared ownership.
- Cultural Induction: This is very important to us at Ovation, and it’s one of my favourite parts of the job, learning about the school’s values, routines, and student wellbeing priorities. A short induction session with pastoral care staff can be powerful.
- Site Walkthrough and Logistics Review: Tour the kitchen, dining areas, and storage facilities together. Discuss traffic flow, service times, and any quirks of the site.
- Service Solution: From listening to your needs and after conducting assessments, the Ovation team are able to formulate a tailored solution with a clear plan. There might be multiple parts of the plan to consider at the same school; eg: from the larger scale of dining halls serving main meals, to the smaller scale of a school café that’s open at break times.
- Pilot Service Week: Together we run a “soft launch” week with limited menus or trial events. This is when we can test food quality, service timing, and responsiveness. It’s also a valuable way to support kitchen staff who might be new, or existing staff at the school who are learning new ways of doing things and this helps them with this transition.
- Feedback Loops: We recommend establishing weekly check-ins with the key stakeholders. We can also help you set up a simple feedback tool for students and staff to share their experience anonymously.
- Performance Milestones: Set clear goals for the first 30,60, and 90 days—covering food quality, service consistency, and studentsatisfaction.
Strategic Wrap-Up: Building a Partnership That Nourishes Wellbeing
For us at Ovation, onboarding isn’t just a checklist—it’s the foundation of a relationship that directly impacts student wellbeing. We’ve found that the schools that we work with see us as partners rather than just vendors because they can see how important it is to us to understand them at their core, and the results go beyond the plate. A thoughtful onboarding process fosters trust, aligns values, and ensures that hospitality becomes an extension of pastoral care.
By embedding wellbeing into every step from stakeholder engagement to feedback loops, schools can create a culture where students feel seen, supported, and nourished. At Ovation, we want to be part of that mission to deliver not just meals, but moments of care.
If you would like to find out more about how Ovation Hospitality can partner with your school, please phone John at 022-135-8951 (mob) or drop him an email at: john.rippingham@ovationhospitality.co.nz
