2016 Deloitte OES Prize for Project Improving Takinoa Restaurant

The 2016 Deloitte OES Prize for the best student project in Prof. Weber’s graduate course “Operations: Economics and Strategy” was awarded to Céline FISCHER, Valentin TERRAIL, and Xiaoran YU. Their outstanding report, entitled “Takinoa Restaurant at the Rolex Learning Center: Operations and Demand Analysis” contains a detailed hedonic pricing study, based on an electronic survey of approximately 1300 EPFL students, as well as inventory/order-optimization study for one of their staple pastries: blueberry muffins. The Takinoa restaurant, which opened in early 2016, has not been particularly popular with students, and the detailed student report suggests several possible explanations, including a gap in perceived value possibly due to ineffective communication of Takinoa’s “Food for Joy” health-conscious credo, and not providing enough quantity of relatively cheap food items such as pasta. The company’s founder, Eric Lebel, attended the students’ project presentation and expressed great interest in their results. The judges were impressed by the team’s outstanding presentation and very detailed data-driven study, which yielded unexpected insights—for example, the addition of fruit tends to slightly decrease the willingness to pay for a given menu. The students recommend to provide better information about Takinoa’s healthy ingredients and to reshape their menu so as to better meet student demand and purchasing power (or relative lack thereof).

The first runner-up project for the Deloitte OES Prize was “Arcadie’s Burger: Achieving the Big Comeback,” by Stanislas Le Boucher d’Hérouville, Christophe Reiners, and Christopher El Hayek. The second runner-up was “Satellite: Improvement of Consumer Surplus” by David Baur, Nicolas Mayenzet, and Silas Schlatter.

In total, 13 teams entered the Deloitte OES Prize competition. The projects’ aim was to identify potential operational improvements in mostly local companies, including, in addition, BPA (a Hertz car rental operation in the South of France), Mika Alimentation (an Asian food store), Motilla (a citrus fruit exporter), kebab stores in the center of Lausanne, Magellan (a small luxury watch maker), PubliBike, Rohr Chocolate, SushiZen, La Fontaine (a book store at EPFL), and Verre En Cave (an online wine retailer in Geneva). The jury was composed of Nic Bosshard, a senior manager with Deloitte, Ilir Tahiri, a business analyst with Deloitte, and Prof. Thomas Weber.

The members of the winning team each obtained an Apple iPad, sponsored by Deloitte, as first prize. Deloitte, which has 6 offices in Switzerland, was involved with Prof. Weber’s course throughout the fall, coordinated by Ilir Tahiri. 2016 marks the fourth consecutive year that the Deloitte-OES Prize has been awarded. Past winners are:

• 2015: Christophe DONZÉ, Niels PICHLER, Benjamin PREVIDOLI
  (“Selecta on the EPFL Campus”)
• 2014: Shubham BANSAL, Thomas GUIBENTIF, Marc SOLSONA BERNET
  (“Le Négoce: Survival Under Extreme Conditions”)
• 2013: Dimitri CORDENIER, Alexis DUBIL
  (“GeoRoute at PostLogistics”)

Link to the “Operations: Economics and Strategy” course page:http://econspace.net/MGT-528.html