When customers are diverse it is important that service providers also transform themselves to be gender diverse
Women leaders are playing a very important role in the food service industry, and we see their increased participation in the entire production, planning, delivery, and strategy processes. In our own organization we have seen a huge change, our finance officer, our head of supply chain, our head of enterprise architecture, and several other women employees are involved in the effective management and delivery of our food service solutions to clients. This is now becoming a national trend because it is clearly being recognizing that an effective organization requires diverse skills but also diverse attitudes to come together for the successful delivery of the value proposition that organizations wish to build for their customers.
When customers are diverse it is important that service providers also transform themselves to be gender diverse. An important value that a gender diverse team brings is that it looks at a problem in more dimensions, drives innovation, and provides better consumer insights. Food services, particularly, is a multi-dimensional activity involving, flavors and tastes, smell, touch, and visual appeal. To believe that only one gender can combine the expertise of the 5 senses would be a bit shortsighted. The humankind consists of genders in equal measure because they have a varying perspective to these 5 senses. This is where it is increasingly being recognized that to combine the way humankind has been evolving and delivering a good food experience bringing together these 5 senses with inputs from all genders makes the food offers more representative and more inclusive to be therefore enjoyed widely and not just male centric and driven only for male taste.
This is how traditionally food was produced and some organization continue to be still the same, in fact, some large multinational organizations in the food service industry in India continue to lack gender diversity given by their overwhelming dependence on the process. Gender diversity helps to challenge the status quo of a male dominated delivery model in the food service industry, that is why homerun enterprises like ours have been able to achieve a much wider gender diversity target given our traditional values of including women in decision making.
We see that large multinational food service organizations in India continue to struggle in bringing diversity to the teams confining it to the largest traditional domains of Marketing and PR. When we made this huge step up it was a conscious effort to be mindful of the fact that we must build an enterprise that is all-inclusive and diverse.
DRE Reddy, CEO and Managing Partner at CRCL, and Swarna Rajamani AGM-Strategy