Red Rabbit is a phenomenal organization that provides healthy, made-from-scratch meals for students in over 180 schools across the NYC metro area. This summer I had the opportunity to work closely with the operations team along with senior management across all functions to help further develop the company’s employee training program and materials. These tools will prove useful as the company continues to expand and grow, bringing on new hires who need to get up to speed quickly, as well as provide operational continuity if team members need to learn about other areas of the business. I also created a dynamic kitchen operations dashboard to streamline the company’s operational assessment processes. This will allow the team to enter information daily and weekly in an easy manner, and helped highlight key targets and metrics on our KPIs that the team wanted to measure.

My CBS education has provided me with the ability to marshall any resources I might have to maximize the results I seek to achieve. Whether that be colleagues, alumni, or broader university capabilities, successfully leveraging resources was critical to my CBS experience and was crucial to my work at Red Rabbit this summer, particularly when it came to locating the right individuals and information to build out the training documents. Furthermore, my coursework and previous internships enhanced my abilities to synthesize data into tangible results, complete in-depth analyses with multiple factors and producing recommendations, and create systems from scratch that can be sustainable and usable in a dynamic environment, all skills which were invaluable in building out the dashboard.

With the hectic nature of the business and the ever-shifting priorities and responsibilities of the leanly-staffed team, it was challenging at times to get all of the information needed for a given project. With that said, everyone at the organization was more than willing to make time when they had some available, it just required some additional flexibility on all of our parts! Getting up to speed on the intricacies of the business and the organization as a whole involved a solid learning curve, but the team was incredibly helpful and hopefully the materials I developed will alleviate some of those challenges in the future.

This internship highlighted the power of instilling the right culture within an organization. Everyone at Red Rabbit is incredibly passionate about the company’s mission and goals and is constantly working to ensure the company is functioning smoothly and that customers are always provided with a top-level product and experience. With everyone motivated to do their very best, even a lean group of individuals can build, sustain, and expand an incredibly impactful operation. The experience reinforced the importance of maintaining that “scrappy” and “hungry” vibe as much as possible even in larger organizations because it lessens complacency, builds camaraderie, and pushes everyone to test the boundaries and keep innovating.