In recognition of Women’s History Month, IFMA The Food Away from Home Association is looking back at six women whose pioneering work earned them the association’s coveted Gold Plate Award, an honor synonymous with foodservice operator of the year.
We present them chronologically beginning with our first female Gold Plate honoree who received the award in 1961.
Moving the needle on healthcare foodservice quality from bland as cardboard to delicious and nutritious isn’t easy. But we know a remarkable operator who not only set out to do just that, but succeeded way beyond expectations.
Toni Watkins creates raved-about patient experiences in foodservice and shares her expertise as well. Her’s is a story worth savoring.
Toni Watkins shows nutritious food doesn’t mean bland fare
Only two foodservice professionals from the healthcare business have ever won a Gold Plate Award, an honor bestowed annually for the last 70 years on the operator deemed the best across all industry segments. When Antoinette “Toni” Watkins was chosen in 2021, there hadn’t been an honoree from the field in 39 years (the last was Jacques Bloch in 1982), and never a woman.
But colleagues weren’t surprised that Watkins, director of Food & Nutrition Services for Riverside Health System in Newport News, VA, was the one to end the drought. In her 10 years at the facility, she has shattered the perception that fare served in acute-care facilities had to be bland and unexciting, with functionality trumping delight.
In addition to running the foodservice operations of five acute-care facilities, Watkins oversees seven senior-living operations, where residents expect their meals to be nutritious yet as enjoyable as anything they could order in a streetside restaurant. Peers laud Watkins for pushing the limits on both the art and therapeutic value of what’s served from Riverside’s kitchens.
But she hasn’t stopped there, those colleagues attest. During the pandemic, for instance, she readily shared the adjustments that had worked within her facility with the rest of the healthcare segment.
Watkins took over Riverside’s foodservice operations from a contract management concern, which enjoyed the purchasing leverage and other resources typically wielded by a big company. Lacking the corporate infrastructure a contractor readily supplies, Watkins had to forge one for her new charge. That meant looking at new technology, from a POS system suited to the times, to automated drink dispensers.
"It was quite overwhelming,” Watkins told IFMA The Food Away from Home Association the year she was honored. “I could not do it [alone.] I helped to build the team that helped me to do it.”
She started cooking at age 6 and decided early on to turn her passion into a career as a dietician. Heeding her mother’s advice, Watkins decided she could help people more readily by addressing the culinary side of feeding people as well as nutritional considerations.
She’s now been in the field for nearly 35 years and remains active in such industry groups as the Association of Healthcare Food Service (AHF) and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
Slowing down is not in her plans. “This award truly means a lot,” Watkins said after winning the Gold Plate in 2021. “It’s a lifetime achievement,” she said, “but it’s not the end.”
Special thanks to our sponsor Conagra.