Paul Carr, senior director of culinary for Aramark, exerts a strong influence over the approximately 15 million meals served daily by the Philadelphia-based contract services giant.
Carr manages the team that develops culinary strategies and provides on-trend concepts and recipe collections for six Aramark lines of business, including higher education, K-12, business dining, sports and entertainment, health care, and corrections facilities.
“Paul’s a quiet leader, leading from a position of knowledge, passion, with a humble confidence without an overdeveloped ego,” says Doug Martinides, Aramark’s vice president of culinary development. “He’s also a good sounding board and advisor as well as influencer as he works with each of our business unit partners.”
According to Martinides, Carr’s strengths include “a great palate and understanding of flavor coupled with the discipline of development and ability to translate strategy into outcomes that are easy to execute.”
TITLE: senior director of culinary, Aramark, PhiladelphiaBIRTH DATE: Aug. 29, 1965HOMETOWN: Neptune, N.J.EDUCATION: Culinary Institute of America, Hyde Park, N.Y., 1985CAREER HIGHLIGHTS: creating culinary competitions in business services and higher education lines; advancing the importance of culinary within Aramark’s culture; coordinating an annual program of international chefs; winning MenuMasters awards in 2002 and 2005; winning 2004 Research Chef Association Innovation Award for Rolletto’sPERSONAL: married, two childrenLAST NEW DISH ROLLOUT: coconut-cardamom rice puddingLAST DISH REVAMPS: classic Chinese-American dishes, including kung pao chicken, orange chicken, sweet-and-sour porkFAVORITE SNACK: warm chocolate chip cookies Keeping his feet on the ground Carr joined Aramark in 1989 as a unit-level chef, an experience he says has proved invaluable in his current position. “You really need to be grounded in what can be accomplished at a unit level, and what kind of training materials you’ll need for your frontline employees,” he says. “So kind of growing up in the units was definitely very beneficial to where I’m at today, as we’re producing these concepts and recipes. I constantly think back to a few people that I’ve worked with—you know, my pizza maker, would he be able to make this dish that we’re coming up with?” The unit-level experience also influenced his thinking about how things work ergonomically. “I think it’s just as important to set up the station correctly,” Carr says, “in the correct flow, as to give them the right recipe, so they can produce it quickly, so the customer doesn’t have to wait, so we can get a great product through with good speed of service.” Carr’s career trajectory reflects Aramark’s philosophy of promoting from within, Martinides says. “It’s our culture to staff from the field as a part of career planning and development of our chefs and to be the champion of the frontline as we go through development,” he says. “At the end of the day, if what we’re developing isn’t something that the field needs and sees as valuable, we haven’t done our jobs. Paul has embraced this philosophy, and the results show.” Carr was instrumental in the design and opening of Aramark’s Innovation Center, located near the company’s Philadelphia headquarters, which includes a large kitchen equipped with all the types of equipment needed for various Aramark concepts, plus room for front-of-house training sessions. The space features lots of mobile equipment, making it easy to reconfigure as needed when working on a particular concept. “I’m very much a fundamentalist,” says Carr, explaining how his Culinary Institute of America and fine-dining experience continue to shape his work. “Everything I do, I think about the basics, and how food works. … Even when you’re doing innovation, you still have to stay true to the properties of the food. You can’t go way off base—a mushroom has a lot of water in it, and you can’t avoid that. So you have to understand how each ingredient works as well.” Going global One major change that Carr has welcomed since he joined Aramark is the increasing influence of international flavors. “I think we’re definitely doing more world flavors,” he says. “That’s become even more important. We’re digging deeper into cuisines than we used to. It’s not just Mexican anymore—it’s regional Mexican, and moles, tomatillos and salsas are starting to become mainstream. Most people know about it. That’s very different. So I think just the fact that we’re doing some more truly authentic world flavors keeps it very interesting, too, because we’re constantly learning.” He says he sees Southeast, Indian and Mediterranean flavors as big trends moving forward. For Carr, it’s important to understand the authentic culinary roots of a dish before trying to translate that into a rollout. With Indian cuisine, for instance, “we actually started with making our own masalas and curries so that we understood what the spice blends were for each one of those,” Carr says. While realizing that mixing spice blends from scratch would probably be too difficult for operators, he felt it was important to know how to make it to have a good reference point for choosing a commercially available product. The greater emphasis on world flavors, Carr says, fits within an overarching trend of great-tasting healthy foods. “I think a combination of the cuisines are great on their own, but the fact that I can find some health benefit in them and not give up flavor is what’s really going to help drive them,” Carr says. “I think I learned that along the way, too, that it was very important for me to have the food really be the hero, even with the healthier items. And once you start to work with it, and over years of developing lower-fat items, you start to understand how to do that effectively. It’s not that difficult once you educate yourself and you start to look at world flavors.” Martinides says: “I’m proud to have Paul on the team and excited to see that NRN and the MenuMasters panel have recognized what we in Aramark have known for years. His commitment to innovation and excellence in culinary research and development over his career puts him in a special class of culinarians, and I look forward to continuing our partnership for years to come.”
