Food Presentation Can Lead to Healthier Selections in Cafeterias

There has been a push in the last several years for cafeterias to offer healthier food options. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example, passed new regulations in 2012 requiring more whole grains, fruits, and vegetables in school cafeterias.

However, once the food is there, it’s up to patrons to make healthy choices when building a plate. A cafeteria can make a few simple changes to encourage these healthier choices.

How can things like rearranging food options, adding labels and information about options, and offering trays with small dishes make such a difference?

Know Your Patrons

First, it’s important to remember who will be going through the line in your cafeteria. In a hospital, patrons might be of all ages, and children are likely to be accompanied by an adult. In a middle school, children are likely to make decisions about food selection on their own.

Children and adults are drawn to different kinds of food and different displays, so encouraging healthy eating is different, depending on your patrons.

For example, a tactic used by grocery stores to encourage purchasing certain products is to place them at eye level. For children, this means that healthier options should be near the lower shelves, while adults are more likely to notice them on the middle shelves.

Children are also more likely to react to more colorful foods, and those that are well designed. For example, placing a sample dish with healthy, colorful options, and making a face on the plate might encourage children to mimic the display.

Adults, on the other hand, are less likely to be influenced by the way the food is designed, and prefer fewer foods and colors on their plates. However, making healthy food attractive and easy to see will encourage adults to select these items. Fresh, quality fruits and vegetables are bright and colorful on their own, so simply placing them in a visible area can encourage adult patrons to choose them.

Use Small Plates

One of the biggest issues that leads to unhealthy eating choices is portion size. Small plates fill up faster than large ones, which can encourage patrons to eat smaller portions or to choose fewer selections, ultimately, leading to healthier eating choices.

Put Healthy Options in High Traffic Areas

When a hungry patron comes into a cafeteria, they are most likely to fill their plate with the first things they notice. Placing healthy foods, like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, in a high traffic area like the entrance to the cafeteria will encourage more people to eat these foods.

Similarly, placing easy to grab health foods, like apples, bananas, or pears near the checkout counter – another high traffic area – is a great way to encourage patrons to select these items on their way out.

Add Labels and Descriptions

It is important to label all foods in a cafeteria, but the depth of the food descriptions can make a difference in whether or not the food is selected.

The name of the food should, of course, be the first thing on the label to help patrons recognize the food. The more descriptive the name, the more likely an adult patron is to select the food item.

Cafeterias that include health claims on food items may also find that those foods are selected more often, because the description encourages the patron to think about long term effects about what they’re eating now.

Offer Express Checkout

In public cafeterias, offering a healthy express checkout can be an incentive for patrons to fill their plates with healthy options. A checkout line may only serve patrons who are eating both fruits and vegetables, or who fill a certain portion of their plate with greens. Either way, this checkout line is reserved only for healthy eaters.

Food Presentation Can Lead to Healthier Selections in Cafeterias

Food Presentation Can Lead to Healthier Selections in Cafeterias

There has been a push in the last several years for cafeterias to offer healthier food options. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example, passed new regulations in 2012 requiring more whole grains, fruits, and vegetables in school cafeterias.

However, once the food is there, it’s up to patrons to make healthy choices when building a plate. A cafeteria can make a few simple changes to encourage these healthier choices.

How can things like rearranging food options, adding labels and information about options, and offering trays with small dishes make such a difference?

Know Your Patrons

First, it’s important to remember who will be going through the line in your cafeteria. In a hospital, patrons might be of all ages, and children are likely to be accompanied by an adult. In a middle school, children are likely to make decisions about food selection on their own.

Children and adults are drawn to different kinds of food and different displays, so encouraging healthy eating is different, depending on your patrons.

For example, a tactic used by grocery stores to encourage purchasing certain products is to place them at eye level. For children, this means that healthier options should be near the lower shelves, while adults are more likely to notice them on the middle shelves.

Children are also more likely to react to more colorful foods, and those that are well designed. For example, placing a sample dish with healthy, colorful options, and making a face on the plate might encourage children to mimic the display.

Adults, on the other hand, are less likely to be influenced by the way the food is designed, and prefer fewer foods and colors on their plates. However, making healthy food attractive and easy to see will encourage adults to select these items. Fresh, quality fruits and vegetables are bright and colorful on their own, so simply placing them in a visible area can encourage adult patrons to choose them.

Use Small Plates

One of the biggest issues that leads to unhealthy eating choices is portion size. Small plates fill up faster than large ones, which can encourage patrons to eat smaller portions or to choose fewer selections, ultimately, leading to healthier eating choices.

Put Healthy Options in High Traffic Areas

When a hungry patron comes into a cafeteria, they are most likely to fill their plate with the first things they notice. Placing healthy foods, like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, in a high traffic area like the entrance to the cafeteria will encourage more people to eat these foods.

Similarly, placing easy to grab health foods, like apples, bananas, or pears near the checkout counter – another high traffic area – is a great way to encourage patrons to select these items on their way out.

Add Labels and Descriptions

It is important to label all foods in a cafeteria, but the depth of the food descriptions can make a difference in whether or not the food is selected.

The name of the food should, of course, be the first thing on the label to help patrons recognize the food. The more descriptive the name, the more likely an adult patron is to select the food item.

Cafeterias that include health claims on food items may also find that those foods are selected more often, because the description encourages the patron to think about long term effects about what they’re eating now.

Offer Express Checkout

In public cafeterias, offering a healthy express checkout can be an incentive for patrons to fill their plates with healthy options. A checkout line may only serve patrons who are eating both fruits and vegetables, or who fill a certain portion of their plate with greens. Either way, this checkout line is reserved only for healthy eaters.

Food Presentation Can Lead to Healthier Selections in Cafeterias

Does Knowing Nutritional Information Help You Make Healthier Eating Choices?

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has passed a new law in the United States that will require many chain restaurants to include calorie information for all food items on the menu. The goal, according to the FDA, is to “help consumers make informed choices for themselves and their families.” (FDA website)

The law goes into effect on December 1, 2016. Restaurants that will be affected by the new law include those that are part of a chain with 20 or more locations. That means that sit-down restaurants, drive thrus, those that serve take-out, coffee shops that serve food, many bars, and more, will be required to provide calorie count information to consumers.

The question is, will having these calorie counts available help the general population make healthier eating choices?

How Do Calorie Labels Affect Areas Where They Are Already in Use?

McDonald’s has already started providing calorie counts on all foods. Arizona State University conducted a study conducted a study to determine whether consumers would notice the calorie counts at McDonald’s, and if noticed, if those calorie labels would affect consumers food choices.

According to the study, certain consumers were more likely to notice that the calorie information was provided and to use it to make healthier consumption habits. Things like higher education and higher income both increased a consumer’s likelihood to do so.

New York City has been labeling calories on food since 2008, and Seattle has been requiring it since 2009. In both cities, it has been shown that for those who notice that the calorie counts are on the food, it does have some effect on the ordering and eating habits.

The question then becomes, how do we encourage people to pay attention to nutrition labels that are on foods?

A Brief History of Nutrition Facts and Food Labels

According to an article on the New York Times blog, “nutrition labels weren’t required on packaged foods in the United States until the 1990s.” Since then, there haven’t been major changes to the way that foods are labeled when it comes to health and nutrition.

When you’re purchasing foods at the grocery store, do you pay attention to the nutrition facts on the label? Do they affect your decisions to purchase or eat certain foods, or how much of those foods you eat?

Today’s nutrition labels are designed based on the eating habits of the American population in the 70’s and 80’s. Some schools today are working to make sure that when today’s children grow up, they know how to select a healthy meal, whether it is based on nutrition facts or not.

Teaching Today’s Kids to Eat Healthy

When compared to schools in other countries, American school lunches are not always the healthiest. Some schools have started to teach kids how to select a healthy lunch. A study at Cornell University showed that when children are given options before lunch time to pre-order their lunch, they are more likely to eat healthy than they are when they see and smell the foods they have to choose from at lunch time when they are already hungry.

In addition to making choices when they’re not hungry and cannot see or smell the food, some schools have opted to offer healthier options than they have in the past. In some cases, this means limiting calorie counts on lunch, and in other cases, it means simply offering more fruits and vegetables, and more whole grains.

While there is still some debate on how well these school systems are working, the idea is to get children to pay more attention to what they are eating and how it affects their bodies – the same thing that the new laws are hoping to accomplish with American adults.

Getting A Handle On Food Waste

From cafeterias to homes, there are many ways that we waste food in the United States. According to NPR, Americans throw out about a third of the food available to us, and restaurants throw away as much as ten percent of the what they buy. Wasting food is a problem for cafeterias on many levels. First and foremost, it represents wasted money, and few cafeterias can afford to throw away any of their budget.

On a broader scale, this waste represents environmental damage. Wasted food ends up in landfills, and as it rots, it generates harmful greenhouse gasses which contribute to climate change.

Because of the ongoing damage, the Environmental Protection Agency has issued a challenge for the United States to reduce its wasted food by 50 % by 2030.

At this point, the challenge is voluntary, but many restaurants have already begun to work towards reducing their waste in order to promote their restaurant as green and increase profits. For school cafeterias, showing that the kitchen is doing everything possible to reduce waste, manage budgets, and go green can help show that the cafeteria is giving kids healthy opportunities to eat and learn.

Rightsize your recipes

When you use food inventory software in your cafeteria, you can look at how much of a particular dish you’ve sold in the past, and plan the right amount to cook this time so that you don’t have waste to throw out.

Manage your inventory

Every kitchen has experienced the frustration of finding an ingredient pushed to the back of the fridge which has now gone bad. By digitally managing your inventory, you can keep track of what needs to be used up when, and plan ahead.

Rely on data, not opinions

There’s plenty of emotion and instinct involved in cooking, but a successful cafeteria balances this with data driven decisions. If you want to show that kids enjoy a particular recipe, reaching for data about how many servings were sold is more useful than word of mouth from servers.

If your cafeteria’s goal is to reduce waste, reuse ingredients when possible, and rightsize its portions to maximize profits and increase satisfaction, software to give you a clear idea of your kitchen’s inventory is the first, important step towards achieving that goal. For now, the EPA goal is non-mandatory, but given increasing pressure from various groups, that may not be the case in the long term. Act today to choose the best software for your kitchen!

How Social Media Can Bring More Students into Your Cafeteria

As students head back to school this fall, are you and your food service program prepared for the excitement and business of the first few weeks back from vacation? Are all of your data rollovers complete? Have you tested all of your tech to make sure it won’t cause slowdowns in the first days of school? Are you using social media to push your involvement in your school lunch plan?

You may not think of social media as a way to drive participating in school lunches, but some schools are using it to great effect. Take the example of Colorado State University, where the school dramatically improved participation in the meal plan by advertising a certain number of gourmet meals that would be available at a particular time and place.

How can social media benefit your food service program? Let’s take a look.

Promote Certain Items to Increase Student Interest

Let’s say that you have a glut of a particular ingredient in the pantry, and are trying to increase purchasing of a certain dish, so that the supply doesn’t go bad. In the past, you might have made some sort of sign or flyer offering a discount or promoting the item. Try putting it out on social media instead. Tell them how great it is, offer a discount for those who preorder their school lunch, or just increase participation by reminding them of the convenience of the school’s food service program.

If you’re working with a younger student population, you could offer stickers to those who try a new food, like this Farm to School program did in Mississippi.

Increase Online School Lunch Preorders

Encouraging students to preorder their lunches online can save your district a ton of paper, frustration, and planning time. For younger students, the target can be their parents, and for older students, they may be able to complete a school lunch preorder on their own. But however you get the preorders completed, you’ll be able to better plan for the food you have in the freezer, the pantry, and needing to be used. You’ll experience less waste and keep costs down, which can help your food service department run more smoothly for everyone, students and employees alike.

Consider Which Social Media Platforms Are Best for Your District

If you’re tempted to start exploring your options for bringing your food service program’s marketing online through social media, make sure you’re well aware of which social media platforms the kids in your district, or their parents, use. Hardly anyone uses Facebook anymore with any seriousness, especially kids. Colorado State University found the best connections with their target kids through YikYak and Snapchat. They also found useful connections on the subreddits specific to their school.

Talk to the kids in your district, and find out what messages would reach them, then target those services. This way, the message will get where it’s needed.

Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment

For a lot of social media advertising, the only thing it’s going to cost you is time, and the benefits to improving the number of school lunches preordered, as well as the overall participation in the school’s food service program, are huge. By reaching out to students and building connections with both them and their parents, you increase the perception of the program as being interested and involved in the health of the kids you serve. Be willing to try new strategies and new ways of connecting so that new students can find their way into your food service program and enjoy the benefits of healthy meals.

Catering Success with Catering Software

The world of business is modernizing, and the catering industry is no exception. In order to stay ahead of the game in a rapidly changing market, you need to enlist some help.

Food management software is designed to give catering businesses the tools they need to really succeed. Read on to find out more.

Boost Your Efficiency

No business can afford to be wasting large amounts of stock, but unfortunately, in the world of catering, this happens all too frequently. Even if you keep a close eye on your operations, and devise thorough plans for each client, you still run the risk of wastage and a dip in profits as a result.

Food management software goes a long way to eliminating this risk altogether. The powerful tools of our software enable business owners and managers to plan precisely what products and ingredients they will need to fulfill a certain contract, making sure that no food gets thrown away.

But out in the field is not the only place that wastage and shrinkage can occur. A powerful piece of inventory management software can help to identify at which points in your supply chain things are going missing, helping you to shine a light on the problem and eliminate it, and boosting your efficiency in the process.

Know Your Business Inside Out

To truly excel in the catering market place, you need to know your business inside and out. This is easy to achieve when your business is still just a fledgling, but what about later on?

How do you keep on top of everything when your business starts to grow?

This is where good quality food management software really comes into its own. By using a food management platform, you will be able to access in depth reports across a variety of metrics, all tailored to your specific query.

This means that, whatever you need to know about your business’ performance or future projections,it is there, readily available, and accessible with only a few clicks of a mouse.

In depth knowledge like this translates to business success; it helps you predict changes in the market before they happen, and adapt your company to accommodate them successfully; it helps you make informed forecasts you can use to measure your future growth targets; and it gives you a convenient vantage point from which to oversee your business as it grows.

Keep Your Customers Smiling… and Returning

A happy customer is a repeat customer, so you don’t need us to tell you that customer satisfaction is key to catering success.

Making sure that your services match and surpass the expectations of your clients is simple as long as you have a good piece of food management software on your side. A great piece of food management software will enable you to effectively oversee your inventory replenishment processes, ensuring that you are always able to provide your clients with what they need, without fail.

It will enable you to assess the performance of your suppliers, reducing costs were necessary and streamlining your stock renewal operation. In turn this will give you the power to price your services competitively within the market.

A great piece of software will also enable you to plan ahead, devising strategies and game plans for your business as it grows, devising new recipes and menus and creating products and service packages that will keep your clients coming back for more.

This benefit doesn’t extend only to your existing client roster, but also becomes a driving force for growth. As word spreads and your clients refer your services to others, you will see an upturn in the number of your regular customers as a direct result of the software.

With such wide-ranging benefits to your business, can you afford not to pursue catering success with catering software?

School Lunch Orders – Getting Paid Up Front vs. Getting Paid in the Lunch Line

According to statistics, nearly one-third of children between 6 and 19 years of age are considered obese. And a contributing factor is their choosing less healthy foods in school lunchrooms.

To encourage children to make healthier food choices, schools need to consider implementing school lunch preorder and pre-payment programs that can preempt hunger-based, spontaneous selections while eliminating sensory cues like smells and sights. At the same time, preordering of lunch can help schools minimize waste, allow for minimal inventory, and optimize freshness of products.

What are the real benefits of school lunch preorder and pre-payment? We’ve listed them below.

Parents Are in Full Control of Students’ Eating Patterns

With meal preordering and payment, parents and children can decide in advance whether they’re packing a lunch or buying one. As such, they will never have to worry about last-minute treks to the grocery store or conversations like “Where’s my lunch?” ten minutes before the bus arrives.

Students Know What They’re Going to Be Served

When students know what they are going to be served, lunch service itself becomes significantly quicker. At the same time, preordering and pre-payment of lunch allows schools to increase revenue by reducing costs and operating more efficiently.

Studies have shown that for every dollar given for lunch money, only 70 cents gets spent at school. Since meal preordering and pre-payment involves online payments, a cashier is no longer needed. The money ends up in the bank without having to count the drawer, fill out the deposit slip, and run to the bank to deposit it. And parents don’t need to worry about how their child’s lunch money is really being spent.

Upfront Costs Are No Longer an Issue

When getting paid up-front, schools and lunch providers don’t need to be concerned about collecting the cash from the students. Also, receivables are no longer at risk of aging, minimizing collection risk considerably. As consumers, we pay for goods upfront when ordering online, and this can be applied to meal preordering as well.

Lunch Becomes More Organized and Takes Less Time

Paying for meals in the lunch line can be difficult to organize and supervise, especially when every student orders something different. This is not the case when school lunch orders are placed ahead of time: students just go to the lunchroom, and the attendant knows what to serve. There are no decisions to be made, and students don’t have to look for lunch money. Kids can simply pick-up their meal and eat it.

Schools Can Get Out of the Lunch Business Altogether

Schools are not in the food service business by choice. Feeding kids is a necessity. However, many schools choose to opt out of the school lunch order and payment process if possible. Most of the time, contracting with a management company or caterer to make and deliver food is the best option.

In most cases, food is provided by School Board selected vendors. While preordering of meals can solve many problems related to unhealthy food choices, organizers & boards fail to see how they can help with other issues. The food service process can become daunting, and easy solutions get lost in the mix of details. This holds especially true with the combination of order forms, lunch tickets, cash collection, and delivery coordination and reconciliation. Since preordering can help schools save money by eliminating waste, & streamline serving, it also helps students eat healthier.

Preordering and prepayment of school lunch orders will grow as educational institutions become more involved in the health of our nation’s children.

Tips on Becoming a Better Buyer for Your School

Becoming a better buyer for your school lunch program

Acting as a buyer for a school lunch program is a big responsibility. With potentially hundreds of kids to feed, choosing food that is both nutritious, and appealing to a wide variety of kids, can be a challenging task. When you get it right, it can be rewarding and exciting. We’ve compiled a quick list of tips to help you become the best school lunch program buyer your district has ever seen.

Befriend with Your Food Service Distributor

When you’re planning meals that will feed all of the kids in your district, you don’t have time to watch crop forecasts and decide in March whether the dollars that you’re committing to ground beef, for example, will get you the cases that you’re expecting. Your food service distributor, however, absolutely can and does. By talking to them about your needs, you can get a sense, for example, of whether or not you need to transfer dollars to more versatile and less expensive products.

Don’t Forget Storage and Delivery Fees

When you’re comparing commercial bid costs versus USDA costs, it can be easy to forget, and just look at the price of the food. But remember that the USDA billing also includes delivery costs, which can mean that it’s less of a bargain than you think, when compared to your commercial bid.

This is an area where great food service software can help you project your budget cost for different recipes using different suppliers. Plug in all your numbers, and see where your savings really lie.

Keep Costs Down by Avoiding Waste

With many USDA suppliers, you’re looking at monthly delivery, which means that ingredients are often frozen until they’re needed. This is a great way to keep food fresh until you’re ready to use it, as long as it doesn’t get pushed to the back of the freezer and forgotten.

If you can keep track of your inventory, you can better plan recipes that will use up the ingredients in the freezer before their use-by dates, reducing waste and keeping your kitchen costs reasonable. Great food service software should always help you manage your inventory and seamlessly transition ingredients into recipe calculations.

Be Wary of Stale Advice

If you’re browsing industry blogs, and you find someone suggesting that chicken is going to be a great buy this year, or that cheese is the magical ingredient that will stretch all of your meals without bringing up costs, keep a close eye on the dates on the posts. While this advice might have been true last school year, for example, it might not be true today.

As a food service program buyer, it’s important for you to always be ready to change your approach to the program. Of course, to really understand what your recipes cost, and how much is used versus how much is discarded, you need good data to survey. High quality food service software can help you gather that data, so that you’re making the most of your food budget.

School lunch programs in the United States feed almost 32 million children a year, contributing to their overall health, wellness, and education. Kids who are well fed learn better, have fewer disciplinary problems, and in general are healthier. By crafting lunch programs that meet their nutritional needs but are also delicious and enjoyable, school lunch buyers become part of a lifelong relationship with food.

When you and your district choose great software to manage your inventory, your recipe creation, and your billing, you make an incredibly complex job substantially easier.

What tips have made you a better buyer for your school lunch program?

Reduce Loss with Food and Beverage Cost Control Software

Some amount of loss is unavoidable in the restaurant industry. Dishes get spilled, or contaminated, or something goes off before you expect it to. Those are some of the costs of doing business in food service. But there are many other ways that loss happens in the food service industry that are much more controllable. By utilizing food and beverage cost control software, you can minimize loss in your kitchen, get costs under control, and help to ensure that your business is profitable.

Monitor Margins

The restaurant and food service industry, more than any other type of business, often operates on razor thin margins. Saving just a few cents on a dish can be the difference between profit and loss. For a restaurant to really know if it’s succeeding or not, it’s important to have a very clear idea of the actual cost of each dish, so that you can make sure it’s being prepared, served, and charged appropriately. If you’re consistently losing a small amount of useable ingredients in every preparation of a meal, that will have a dramatic effect on your bottom line.

Internal Loss

It’s an unfortunate truth that the largest source of loss in any business is internal. Very little of it is malicious, but merely, an opportunity taken. By having processes in place that encourage employees to report all losses as they occur, you are able to keep more accurate inventories, which helps you to create the perception of being watched. Many studies have shown that most people will behave more honestly when know they are being observed. Food and beverage cost control software can help create that perception, and reduce internal loss.

Avoid Spoilage

How often have you reached into your kitchen’s pantry and found an item that you’d absolutely forgotten? One of the important features of great food and beverage cost control software is inventory control. By using software that keeps track of what’s where in your kitchen, you’ll be able to keep track of which foods need to move quickly through the kitchen to avoid being spoiled. You can create dishes which will use up overstock, or put them on special to encourage people to choose them.

Reporting Components

With a small food service business, you might be able to track the basics of your sales and inventory, but as your business gets more complex, it’s impossible to keep track of this without some kind of software; there’s just too much data. Instead of opting for a less specialized software, choose one that will work specifically for your restaurant business. If nothing else, cost control software specialized for the food and beverage industry will have great reporting components that will help you to zero in on where your profits are being lost. The right cost control formulas will help you make sure that you have enough profit margin to keep your business running and profitable, and take a weight off your mind.

Excellent Integration

Don’t waste your time with a software that is going to require you to switch over your accounting programs, or duplicate your work in order to help you out. Make sure that the software you choose fully integrates with your existing data and accounting programs for a truly seamless kitchen software experience. Your time is valuable, and you shouldn’t waste it on busy work.

When you’re looking for a high quality food and beverage cost control software, look for one that combines all of these features to make sure that your kitchen is seamlessly efficient, minimizes loss, and has a clear and consistent understanding of how everything is running.

Big Data is revolutionizing food service

All businesses depend on interactions with their customers for long term success. From Facebook making decisions about what status updates users want to see to grocery stores understanding what to put on their end caps, Big Data drives their decisions. Instead of the typical data collection methods, where everything is plugged into a spreadsheet that limits how the information can be reviewed, Big Data offers a variety of ways to interrogate information and identify patterns.

Here are just three ways that the food service industry is using Big Data to revolutionize how business is run.

Test & Learn

Word of mouth is no way to run a business. Looking at receipts and asking managers which dishes were most popular is good anecdotal evidence, but to really be sure of whether or not a dish is cost effective, popular, and worth continuing to serve, many food service companies are turning to Big Data. QSR Magazine, in an article about Big Data, talks about how Subway has used one of its locations to test out new menu items and determine their potential success before developing and pushing them out to all restaurants.

Menu Analytics

Anyone who has worked in the restaurant business for any length of time knows that a menu is more than just a list of items that restaurant guests can purchase. Graphic design tricks as simple as putting a box around an item name, or adding the word “succulent” to a description of “fresh fish” can increase orders and change purchasing patterns. But to know if your menu changes have worked, you need to have a clear picture of how many items have been ordered with old and new menu designs.

Big Data can help you discover this information.

Customer Patterns

Training servers and operators to offer add-ons is standard business practice, but some customers express frustration at being asked. Is it possible to anticipate which customers will be interested in suggestions, and which will be put off, by the time of day that they’re eating, or the brand of credit card they carry? Big Data says yes. Big Data can help restaurant and food service managers determine what items will be most successful with certain types of customers at certain times of day.

For businesses within the food service industry, having access to Big Data can help them make their business more cost effective, more successful, and help it to produce less waste.

Tell us how your business already makes use of Big Data!