SANTA CLARA, CA – Anticipation surrounding the annual Foodservice Pioneering Concept (FPC) at this year’s HX: The Hotel Experience Powered by AAHOA is justifiably high. Those who have seen the FPC (dubbed Duality) on paper, agree that prospective HX attendees should believe the hype.
“Joseph Schumaker, FCSI [founder and president of FoodSpace] has come up with a unique operation,” said Wade Koehler, CAE, executive director of Foodservice Consultants Society International’s (FCSI) Americas Division in last month’s HX: The News. “Duality is very flexible, so almost any size hotel could utilize it. It’s set up to where it can be used for many different functions.”
Thanks to Schumaker’s hard-won experience in the culinary industry, the FPC concept is designed to work in theory and practice. After earning an AOS degree from California Culinary Academy and working as a chef, Schumaker eventually co-founded his own catering company, a business that thrived for a decade.
Now on the creative side via his Santa Clara, Calif-based Schumaker Consulting Group Inc. (doing business as FoodSpace), Schumaker is free to devise new designs. “In parallel with design, we now offer management services, which includes helping with the operations side of things, especially in corporate cafeterias,” says the 40-year-old Schumaker (pictured). “That translates very well into higher education, hotels, hospitals, or any place where there is a vendor relationship—that’s our expertise.”
A Blank Canvas
At the end of 2015, a notice about FPC submissions surfaced within the FCSI community, and it caught Schumaker’s eye. “I just started thinking about how I would build this pop up portable concept, and with my banquet background, it’s a natural fit,” he says.
A few years and a few versions later, Duality eventually caught the eye of judges. When the letter came announcing that his concept had been chosen, it was nearly thrown away.
“At first I thought it was just a marketing thing,” Schumaker says with a chuckle. “I finally read the letter, and I was super excited. As design consultants, our bread and butter is designing spaces for our clients based on their needs. We rarely get to design based on what we want to do. We get to be creative, but we don’t have ultimate oversight. This experience allowed me to really just do whatever I wanted, with a blank canvas. That was really cool and unique.”
HX attendees will have the best view of Schumaker’s fully realized “canvas” when they visit the show floor Nov 11-12, 2019, at the Javits Center, New York. The specifics are partly under wraps, but some details are available.
According to Schumaker, there is “a lot of engineering involved” in realizing the concept for the first time in three dimensions. “There’s no tooling that exists for some of this,” he says. “It’s all custom the first time. The manufacturers aren’t set up to build this yet. That’s the exciting thing about this opportunity is that we’re actually getting to build it. That’s a big deal.”
With partners such as the Delaware-based Eagle Group, Duality will become a reality for HX attendees. “We’ve been working with Eagle on other projects, and we’ve specified their equipment over the years,” Schumaker says. “They make some really amazing portable pop up products in all different shapes and sizes. They are experts in stainless steel, and they’re a fantastic partner for building Duality.”
As for Duality itself, Schumaker is adamant that it must be seen to be fully understood. The thinking behind it, for example, is in line with the needs of a hotel environment. “I wanted to create a piece of equipment that could be cross functional, so it could exist in a concourse or a lobby, or a throughway, or a trade show or in a banquet setting,” he says. “It would need to be flexible, something you could disassemble, and potentially ship or at least move around. It would need to fit through a standard doorway…But then also it would have to be aesthetically brilliant.
“So if we want to create something very different, what would we need to do?” Schumaker continues. “The thought process is like a donut—outside of Duality is a donut. How do we break up a donut to be reconfigurable into many different form factors? I cut the donut into four pieces and started playing with what those pieces could do. I came up with over 40 different layouts with those four pieces.”
An immersive virtual reality (VR) experience will greet attendees at Duality via a program called “Revit.” Schumaker explains: “We’re creating eight additional virtual concepts that will be fully rendered, full color, so people can come in the Duality area, stick the VR goggles on, and it’s almost as it you’re walking around the space, and you’ll be able to see eight additional visuals of what Duality could be. One of the risks that I had in this was I only get to build one, and the reality is there are hundreds of them floating around in my head.”