Dr. Lobster: What does emergency medicine and a lobster food truck have in common? You’re about to find out.
While this might sound like the beginning of a bad joke, if you asked Kathryn Nuss what emergency medicine and lobster food trucks have in common, the former Operations Medical Director of Emergency Medicine at Nationwide Children’s Hospital would probably say: “A whole lot more than you think.”
Nuss—who still serves as an urgent care physician and works with informatics at NCH—is applying what she learned after decades in emergency medicine to, of all things, the Columbus food scene.
“For years I watched Shark Tank. I loved the idea that somebody can take something that they created, present that in front of people, and have it be life-changing,” Nuss said.
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While watching a follow-up episode in 2017 about Cousins Maine Lobster, an east coast lobster eatery that made its way across the U.S., she noticed an advertisement recruiting potential franchise owners for the business.
“So I grabbed my laptop and filled the form out,” she said. “But nobody’s calling, right? That’s what I thought.”
Somebody did call, though, and in a matter of a few short months Nuss was the very first Cousins Maine Lobster franchise owner in Ohio, which operated as a food truck (today Cousins is also a featured vendor in the recently-opened Budd Dairy Food Hall).
And while it’s easy enough to think that several decades as a lead E.R. physician would prepare one for just about anything, it wasn’t that simple.
“I ran one of the busiest E.R.s in the country,” Nuss said. “And the operational side of a food truck was still a huge challenge for me.”
One of the first issues she encountered was simple but absolutely crucial for a mobile eatery: where to go. At first, Nuss relied on websites showing the schedule of stops for popular local trucks, but there was room for improvement.
Using analytics skills learned from her time in the ER, Nuss began logging data on the truck’s sales, such as weather conditions or what day of the month it was. And through this she was able to extrapolate critical information that helped optimize the truck’s stops.
“It factors in how weather, day of the week, and any number of variables impact sales at a location,” she said. “For example, at some stops Tuesdays are great, but Fridays are slow unless it’s a payday.”
For Nuss, much of her unique system was inspired by John Nance’s 2008 book Why Hospitals Should Fly, which chronicles how healthcare began borrowing the rigid safety measures used by the aviation industry.
And she’s even implemented her own set of safety checks—again inspired by her medical experience—in order to keep workplace-related injuries low and make sure her truck remains intact.
While regular maintenance issues will always be a concern with food trucks, it’s the element of human error Nuss aims to minimize. She’s seen everything from trucks attempting to drive out of a tailgate parking lot while still plugged into a power source, to exhaust hoods ripped off her vehicle.
Now, however, with a rigorous system of checks and clearances in place, these incidents have decreased dramatically.
“Things happen when people don’t have don’t have regular checklists for important tasks. It’s as simple as that,” she said.
According to Nuss, at the end of the day, healthcare and food service, while they might seem inexorably different in many ways, are much more similar than most of us realize. She even plans to write a book, similar to Nance’s, on the topic.
“I’ve learned that there are still a lot of things from healthcare systems and patient safety that apply to the food industry,” she said. “If you really think about, they boil down to whether or not the patient is happy—the guest is happy. In both cases, it’s about customer service.”
Learn more and visit Cousins Maine Lobster at its new Budd Dairy Hall location here: budddairyfoodhall.com/vendors/cousins-maine-lobster/
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