We sat down with Rob Gordon, Olivia Haist, and Chef Cher Harris from the Hersheypark Entertainment Complex in Hershey, PA to discuss how they’ve built a great company culture and trust Arctic for all of their cooling needs.
How about we start with a few introductions?
Rob: Well, I’m Rob Gordon. I have the honor and privilege of being the Managing Director for the Hersheypark Entertainment complex, which envelops Hersheypark, of course, but we also operate the GIANT Center, which is home of the Hershey Bears hockey team. We do the Hersheypark Stadium, where we host a summer concert series, and then the Hershey Theatre, where Live Nation concerts and comedians come through. We also run the food and beverage to make sure that everyone’s happy. The most important thing is making sure that our employees are having the best time ever, because then that really translates into the best experience. It takes an army to do it. I certainly couldn’t do it by myself and truly know that, which is why I’ve asked my friends (Olivia Haist and Chef Cher Harris) to join me.
Olivia, why don’t you share a little bit about yourself and your history with the company, and then Chef Cher we’ll turn to you for the same.
Olivia: I started here when I was 14 years old, making soft serve ice cream cones out at Waterfront Creamery. It’s crazy to think back through all those years in different positions. Every time you’re in a new position you think, “Oh, these are the golden years. These are the years I’m going to look back on and think of as my favorite,” but that’s happening right now. Even though I felt that it’s happened so many times before, being able to be partners with Cher and Rob to feed thousands of people every day is really a dream come true!
Chef Cher: I spent the first 13 years at the resorts, primarily at the Hotel Hershey, as their Executive Pastry Chef, and then moved to Corporate Pastry Chef and helped open the new expansion here at Hersheypark. We created Milton’s ice cream parlor, The Sweeterie, and was also involved with The Chocolatier. I’m basically just having fun with Rob and Olivia now. I’m still learning, especially with how to make things fun and interesting for our guests and enjoying every moment of it.
Olivia: One of the reasons I think it’s a dream come true to work with Cher is she’s the “Pastry queen of the world.”
Chef: Yes, it was a ladies world pastry championship. I competed against ten other countries in 2014 and won the title.
Rob, you’ve been there a while and we’ve only met once, but you’re an infectious guy with enthusiasm and obvious love for your team. Can we hear a little bit more about your story?
Rob: It’s been a long and very exciting time because it does take a lot of passion. That’s come true with everything that we’ve gone through in recent years. I graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Science for Hospitality, and that’s where I really kind of grew into just loving food and beverage and just the whole hospitality of experience and creating memories. I had the opportunity to work at Walt Disney World for seven years, working at various properties throughout there. And I’ll say it’s the hurricanes that pushed me back up north. I came back up north, and that’s when I had the opportunity to join Hershey Entertainment. It’s been a great journey from there. I’m just going across all the different properties and working through. I’m really blessed as I’ve taken the helm as Managing Director after being here for 17 years.
I know when I go home, my family and I talk about my tough day of tasting and having to try things, you know, these beautiful creations that Chef comes up with that we make sure are just as delicious as they look, and they always are. I don’t think my waistline can take it.
Can you speak to the culture of the park and the organization as a whole? Obviously, diversity and the cooperation are quite evident to people who have been to the park, and this extends throughout the organization and specifically the menu in the employee cafeteria.
Rob: The global diversity awareness that we were doing through October.
Olivia: And the cream puffs from today right here too.
Rob: When I say that I’m not just talking about food and beverage, I’m talking about the entire organization – just to really experience something and I’m glad to be able to bring that. And I know that the ladies and especially Chef really kind of dove in and created that menu.
Chef: Absolutely. It was a lot of fun. I mean, it’s it was an initiative companywide; I’d like to think that we kicked it up a notch a little bit and what we did, and it was fun to be able to work with the employees in the cafeteria and kind of come up with ideas of what we thought we could do together, and it wasn’t just picking the most common countries either. We divided it into continents and said let’s see if we can find something from different areas that I would not normally have even investigated a lot of the food typically. It’s been good for everyone around to try these different things and talk about it and why the flavors are what they are. So, it’s been amazing and so inclusive.
Rob: Once you understand what the food is across the world, it’s all very comforting and common. You just can’t fear the fact that it doesn’t seem familiar. I will say that’s what we try to do every day, even in the general population. Every menu that we create, we take them somewhere they didn’t know they could go.
I will say that 96% of the people that come to the park eat. I try to believe that they come for the food, and they just stay for the rides. (Laughs)
Business has been quite strong; can you touch on some of the successes that you’ve seen? It’s been a bit of a challenging time overall, especially when it comes to supply chain and inflation and economic news, but how have you managed to thrive in this challenging environment?
Olivia: I think that a lot of the success that we’ve seen is due to, well we have the best jobs around. It certainly means a lot when one of the three of us or any of the leaders on the team are consistently connecting with the team, encouraging them, having instances like the global diversity menu with the CAF and being able to provide little experiences for that because we’re not just making memories for the guests. We’re trying to make memories for our teams too. I would say that because of the culture that we have on this team and the team of leaders that we have; we’ve been able to see some success with being able to make it through those trying times. I think the best way for us to do that too, is to just think about the excitement that we’re adding. We just kicked off the first scary Halloween season in Hersheypark ever!
We’ve found ways to collaborate with the teams that created these houses, collaborate with everybody within the food and beverage department to deliver a cool Halloween menu that even though this might be the toughest season for us to work through because everybody wants to have fun in the fall and nobody wants to work, or at least delivering exciting offerings that people get amped about being able to serve. It’s so cool to hear that as we were taking our CEO through the park to show him the Halloween stuff, he came back a couple of weeks later as a guest, and the product that he got at Dogs of Doom was even better than what we gave him. Being able to get the team excited about that stuff is cool and makes these seasonal events even more fun.
Hersheypark also has Hersheypark Stadium, along with the diversity of having more than just an amusement park. Is that part of the key to success in making it through tough times and being able to prosper no matter what’s going on?
Olivia: I think so. There is a lot of diversity in the events that we do. Like we might have 8000 people show up for a Bears game over at the GIANT Center and then have maybe 200 people show up at the historic Hersheypark Arena for a Cubs game or an LVC ice hockey game. The same level of care and quality is going into both of those products, despite how different the clientele or even the capacity is. I would say that having so many kinds of operations keep us super engaged because there’s always something happening, but also allows us to not only stretch our resources but find more resources too. If it’s a rainy day in the park, we might be able to ship some more staff over to the GIANT Center to be prepared for that Bears game or just learn from some of the mistakes we’ve made. It just gives us more opportunities to perfect and excel with resources.
Rob: I would like to share this because I will say that a lot of times our team, we don’t even understand what we do in the sense of we’ve just been doing it for so long. We do it so well that after we do concerts back-to-back with a possible football game and parks running, the theater has a show going; we’ve honestly started to say we need to take a pause. Let’s celebrate the win here and really understand what we’ve just accomplished because it’s been a pressure cooker. Hersheypark was the first park to open in the pandemic. We were open before Walt Disney World, really! We operated through the entire season and ran through fall and winter. Then the next year in 2021, we opened on schedule. I think at that point of when everything was kind of uncertain, we tried and really had the plan in place. Chocolate Town was already planned, and we opened through the pandemic in a phased approach. If we hadn’t had that in place, we would have been in a much different situation. Even this year, we reimagined the whole area of the park and kind of redid an attraction and added more around it. To always have something new for our guests to come and check out, with the Jolly Rancher remix and the mix ride that they put in, which was kind of cool. With the food and beverage aspect, we’re always collaborating, connecting. We opened a new dessert truck, the Frozen Spoon. Jolly Rancher Homemade sorbets made by Chef. Because down at Milton’s, all that ice cream is made in-house as well. What’s a fun stat about ice cream, Chef?
Chef: The first year we opened our ice cream parlor, we were only open seven months, but we made over 9000 gallons of ice cream in that parlor!
Olivia: To Rob’s point, I think there are so many moments where we look back and we think, wow, we can’t believe we got through that. Or we had those back-to-back concerts. That was so easy for us to just to keep thinking forward and keep thinking about, what’s this new dessert truck look like? Because it is a team of such passionate people! That’s part of the fun is to be able to push ourselves and challenge each other and figure out ways to increase or figure out ways to just make more memories for everybody.
Rob: It comes down to culture. We all operate like a family, and it really goes again outside of food and beverage, like all the departments, all the entertainment complexes. Our resort friends, you know, we all support one another. And it makes for a very powerful movement when you’re working together to make the entire experience happen.
What lessons were learned during the pandemic, for the leadership team specifically? What do you think the organization did well to enable it to prosper during such trying times?
Rob: What I think about first is that we always said it and it seemed like your most important resource, but ever more than now is people. You’ve got to understand the whole person. I often say I used to be like, “Leave all your stuff at home. I need you to come to work,” and now I need to understand what’s going on at home so you can come to work. I’ve had people come over and work for us at their normal salary, doing just some different job, but that job was very different. It might have been working at a concession stand, but they were still getting paid. We maintained that workforce and kept them with us because that’s what you needed to have. You must find people that are willing to be with you and are on the same mission in mind to accomplish that. I think that we can’t just keep thinking that it’s just going to flip. A light switch is going to happen. How do we really make sure that we’re thinking about that employee’s experience? What is that work life balance to ensure that work is positive?
That’s where the strategy comes in of really being targeted. We can’t just scatter the system and think wide open and see what we catch. We’ve got to be very strategic on what we open and what we’re operating and when we operate and when it opens because that resource is so limited. That’s where you really got time to get a microscope and really look at it so that now we really understand what drives the business. I think that’s where you’re seeing it really, you know. We’re seeing record numbers, where we’re comparing back to 2019, where we had grown to a very successful status. Certainly, after the bump in the road, it seems like everything is coming back except for the fact that it’s a little bit tougher to get that case to you. That’s where you start thinking about the supply chain. This is where it really is trying to think about how we get smarter on how we purchase. Through that pandemic we were always trying to think about how to engineer the best menu. I think a lot of people have started to learn and understand that less choice is sometimes great.
Q: Let’s switch gears a little bit, because I can’t let you off the hook without asking — when you make a capital expenditure like a walk-in cooler, which is significant and requires planning and consider maintenance, how does the group, the three of you decide, hey, we’re going to make this decision to do business company and what are the good things that Arctic does well to help provide peace of mind and make that significant investment? What could we be doing better?
What goes into the decision to make a capital expenditure like a walk-in cooler? What are the good things that Arctic does well to help provide peace of mind when making such a significant investment? Is there anything we could be doing better?
Rob: The one thing that I did want to say is that I’ve really enjoyed working with Arctic because you really build what I need, and the response time has been amazing. I’ve been building a lot of these coolers through this current period. We’ve bought others now, but even more so, it feels like we’ve been buying a bunch and to be putting them up in a timeline like we have. I feel very blessed and honored.
Olivia: The reason why we do a lot of these is we think about the team member experience. We think about what those pain points are, what we can do to make things easier and make them more efficient. When I think about who we’re choosing or what company we’re going with, I think it comes back a lot to the relationships. Like the response time has been great. It’s a lot easier when we can pick up the phone and speak the same language.
Chef: I would talk to the culture that’s already been brought up and how we do challenge one another. But coming back through and really talking about what we’re trying to provide either for our service or for our team members, but it just goes back to, I think, how great we interact with one another and the ability to talk things through.
Is there anything exciting that you guys can share in relation to what’s coming up in 2023 or beyond that?
Rob: Well, we just announced that Wildcat (ride) is back. There was a lot of speculation on the ride, so we’re happy to finally debut the new all-wood and steel hybrid coaster, also known as Wildcat’s Revenge. We are taking riders on a, one-of-a kind ride featuring a 140-foot hill climb, maximum speeds of 62MPH, an 82-degree drop, and 4 inversions. It is the World’s Largest Underflip! It’s been a lot of fun for us as we start to think about it, how does food and beverage relate to that? How do we role experience around that so that it’s not just the attraction, it’s the retail, it’s the game, it’s the food and beverage just make it all inclusive.
There are some things happening in the world of hot dogs. I’m not going to talk about hot dogs, but the idea of it is, do you think about the staple foods that you think about all the time and just how do you take that and then elevate it and make it just be that more of an experience?
Olivia: I don’t know how many times in the past couple of months I’ve heard Rob say the words culinary collective or culinary elevation. One way that we’re hoping to do that going into next year is to have a sharper focus on something instead of trying to fix everything all at once, while also engaging potential new team members, potential new culinary interns, or even just guess by framing all of what we want to do around next year, being the year of the hot dog and trying to just like elevate a park staple, right? We have a hot dog right now, but we want everybody to be talking about our hot dogs and try to engage some of our culinary interns and creating new recipes and gauge our guests and trying out those new recipes, but participating in different things during National Hot Dog Month, which is July, and just seeing how if we can attack this one thing throughout the entire park, like what else could we do?
Chef, are there any more titles in the works? Is there room in the trophy case? What do you have that’s exciting?
Chef: There’s room for it for sure. But I think we’re still dialing in what we can do to enhance the springtime in the park. We now have Hersheypark Dark Nights and Christmas Candylane. Our team is good at collaborating to make that above and beyond experience for everyone. So just really getting our team aligned in how we can be better at each one of those instances.
If you could just give us what it means to you, what it means to people, anything you would like to sum up Hersheypark with?
Chef: Our slogan, you know, is we create fun and that is what we do. But it goes way beyond that. It’s not just about the guest. Our company is just phenomenal.
Olivia: I think we’re right now at the point where we have a team of leaders that are really focused on making sweet memories for the employees. And that feels like that’s what our focus is right now. And that feels like what everybody is collaborating to do.
Rob: It’s tough to follow these ladies. I mean, I’m completely blessed that I get to work with this team. How do we make people’s lives easier? We do that for our employees. We try to do that for guests that are with us. We want to make it easy so they can relax and have time together. I think that’s why we’re in the hospitality business because people want to get away from everything that’s going on around them and escape. You want to be able to do things that you can’t do every day when you come to Hersheypark, that’s what we want to offer, something that you just can’t find anywhere else. That’s why you come! I think that’s why I’m so proud to be part of it. We could have another interview about the fact that our core purpose is to support The Milton Hershey School, which has 2200 students from K through 12. It’s all about making an impact and the community and the world around you. I feel like I get up every morning and I go to work, and I love my job. I love working for Hersheypark because we found a family where everyone that works around us has the same common goal and we all care about each other. So, you just never feel alone, and you can really enjoy and bask in the fact that when you have success, you know you did it. And if you’re failing, you know that it’s okay because we’re going to get back up and try again.
Would you mind expanding upon The Milton Hershey School and how there is a way to support the park from there?
Rob: Our core purpose is to support The Milton Hershey School. Hershey Foods is a publicly traded company. Hershey Entertainment & Resorts, we’re privately owned. We’re owned by the Hershey Trust. Essentially every year our goal is to pay the biggest dividend to The Milton Hershey School, and that gives people and children the opportunity to come to The Milton Hershey School. I mean, they live on property. It’s free of charge and it really makes an impact on the community.
Where can people find out more info on becoming a member of the Hershey team?
Rob: Hersheyjobs.com. Please explore all the wonderful opportunities with our team!
Thank you all so much for your time!
