CBORD History

The History of CBORD

The beginnings of "service" in campus food service

In the early 70s, Art Jaeger was something of a maverick in collegiate food service. To many of his colleagues and peers, the charismatic, motorcycle-riding Director of Dining Services at Cornell University was the person who brought college dining programs out of the dark ages.

When Jaeger took over the program, Cornell, like many college food services, was losing business as students began to demand more variety and flexibility than colleges were used to providing. Jaeger took up the competitive challenge. He started the "Cross-Country Gourmet" program, bringing famous chefs to Ithaca for special meals. He replaced the previous, standard 21-meal plan with, the Co-op Dining Program, a free-flow alternative that allowed a variety of board options, and he took the unprecedented step of hiring an advertising agency and beginning a campaign to keep student appetites on campus. Under his leadership, Cornell Dining soon acquired a reputation for creativity, innovation, and financial success.

So in 1975, when John Alexander-an MBA student and a part-time programmer for Cornell Dining-approached his boss with an unusual business idea, he found a natural ally. Alexander had developed a computer program to track food costs and plan economical menus for the department, a program he thought could be sold to other large collegiate dining services. Both he and Jaeger saw the enormous latent demand in the increasingly budget-constrained industry for any product that would help managers better manage their costs and their time. The changes and the flexibility Jaeger was introducing at Cornell-changes that other institutions were already beginning to imitate-were making college dining more attractive to students, but also making management's job much more complicated.

College dining was about to enter the computer age, and John Alexander and Art Jaeger, along with a third partner, Jim Collins-who left the venture shortly after it began-were ready to lead it there. The partners acquired marketing rights to the menu-planning system from Cornell in exchange for unlimited future upgrades. Alexander's wife Elaine was designated Chief Financial Officer. Each partner contributed the grand sum of $1,000 to get the company off the ground and the big debut was set for the NACUFS (National Association of College and University Food Services) trade show in St. Louis in May, 1975. Just a week before the show, the partners hired J.B. Graves at the Houragency-the same advertising agency Jaeger had used to promote Cornell Dining-to come up with a company and product name, a corporate logo, and an exhibit booth.

Can you spell that please?

Ask five CBORDians where the name "CBORD" came from and you'll likely get five different answers. According to Graves, who presented Jaeger with a list of names to choose from, CBORD was supposed to evoke the company's original connection with Cornell (the Cornell Board Plan). Others say Jaeger wanted a name that would head the "C" column in the Wall Street Journal's listings if the company ever went public. (It never did.) Some point out the pun on "seaboard." Still others suggest the choice was entirely arbitrary--CBORD was just an unusual name chosen to avoid a time-consuming trademark search. Whatever the case, over the years CBORD has always meant many things to many people.

After coming up with names-"CBORD" for the company and "SENTRY" for its only product-Graves designed a logo and screen-printed the exhibit booth background on oilcloth, which he and the partners rolled up and took to St. Louis. They stapled the backdrop to two-by-fours supplied by a local lumberyard and, voilà, CBORD was born.

Built by association: getting involved in the industry
"Art and John saw a need, and they saw a way to fill that need before anyone else did."

NACUFS was an appropriate place to begin. The show marked the beginning of CBORD's long-standing involvement with professional associations-a cornerstone of both its marketing and development strategy. But even more important in the early days were Art Jaeger's personal connections in the industry and his ability, as one early client put it, "to sell ice cubes to Eskimos." Brilliant and enthusiastic, Jaeger was just the sort of salesman who could convince key people in a conservative industry to invest tens of thousands of dollars in a program that was really still in the experimental stage. First sales

Jaeger's credibility and industry leadership played a big role in the first sale of a SENTRY system, to Syracuse University. "It didn't take a lot of selling," recalls Dennis Koehler, then Director of Food Services at Syracuse, when his colleague Carol Heagerty told him Jaeger was promoting a program to track food costs. "Art and John saw a need, and they saw a way to fill that need before anyone else did."

CBORD's biggest competitor at the time was not another company, but institutional inertia-the pencil, paper, and calculator approach to menu planning. Koehler recalls having to fire one of his managers for refusing to participate in the SENTRY program. And Gino Corelli, then the Executive Chef at Brown, one of CBORD's early customers, acknowledges it wasn't always an easy sell to dining staff: "When people heard the word 'computer,' they thought it was going to be hard."

And admittedly, by today's standards, the mainframe SENTRY system was hardly user-friendly. Managers sent their data to a keypunch operator, who turned over the cards to a computer operator, who fed them into the administration's mainframe, which ran a report by the next morning. Written documentation was virtually nonexistent, and the technical support department consisted of a part-time John Alexander-still juggling his CBORD responsibilities with his "real job" at Bankers Trust Company in New York.

Still, even with its inconveniences, early users agree that the SENTRY system saved them time and money, and CBORD was already demonstrating its commitment to continued product development as Alexander scrambled to work out bugs and expand the program's capabilities.

Sales were just enough to keep the company alive. First year revenues totaled $30,000-the price Syracuse paid for its system. In 1976, again through Jaeger's contacts in the industry, the partners made two more key sales: to Michigan State, where Ted Smith was Director of Food Service and to the University of Pennsylvania, where Don Jacobs headed up the dining program. Like the Syracuse sale, these were made possible by Jaeger's contacts and Alexander's technical know-how. Smith remembers that he had been checking into a system marketed by Transtech-one of CBORD's early competitors-but was dissatisfied with what he saw. He asked Jaeger to come out for a demonstration and, since CBORD couldn't yet afford sales travel, even picked up the tab for the trip.

SENTRY, eh?

CBORD made its first move into the international market in 1978 with sales to the University of Guelph and the University of Calgary. Although crossing an international border was an important first, Calgary would turn out to be a landmark sale for other reasons as well, not least of which was Calgary's General Manager of Food Services, Brent Davis. Not only did Davis continue to adopt CBORD systems at Calgary-including the ACCESS system in 1984-but he would also bring CBORD access controls and food service systems into the planning and execution of the 1988 Winter Olympics. "I told them that the question wasn't whether they wanted to pay license fees, but whether they wanted CBORD to be around," remembers Davis. "Most of them accepted the deal."

Most importantly, though, Davis became a leader among CBORD users. In retrospect, he characterizes his early relationship with CBORD as both adversarial and supportive. On the one hand, when Calgary invested in the software, Davis recognized the university's strong interest in CBORD's continued survival and development. So when the company started charging ongoing license fees in exchange for continuous upgrades, for example, Davis went behind the scenes to fellow users and pushed them to accept. "I told them that the question wasn't whether they wanted to pay license fees, but whether they wanted CBORD to be around," remembers Davis. "Most of them accepted the deal."

On the other hand, Davis helped organize CBORD's early users into a formidable bargaining unit that could demand changes and get them. "It was a lot easier for CBORD to say 'no' to us one by one," Davis remembers, "than to say 'no' to the entire group." Although this strategy meant that early encounters between users and CBORD staff could be fairly tense, it's clear in retrospect that a deeply involved and effective user lobby has been one of the company's chief assets and one of the reasons for its success.

Another important early user of the system was Margaret Lacey, who had been manager of the Noyes dining hall at Cornell until she left to become Director of Food Service at Columbia University in 1976. At Cornell, Lacey had been an early "guinea pig" for the SENTRY system and had taught Alexander a great deal about the menu-planning process. When she arrived at Columbia-where a serious food theft problem, compounded with soaring inflation, had raised food costs to well over 45% of the total budget-she made installation of SENTRY a top priority. "The system paid for itself almost immediately," she remembers. During Lacey's tenure, Columbia became a site where current and prospective users could see a knowledgeable manager operating the system at its full potential.

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