City closing Sportsplex concession

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This article was published 28/03/2019 (2584 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Hungry visitors at Brandon’s Community Sportsplex will have to be satisfied with vending machines after the city discontinues its food-concession services April 26.

Starting May 1, the Sportsplex will offer beverages and snacks from the facility’s expanded vending-machine options.

Six part-time attendants and a full-time concession manager will be laid off.

The City of Brandon, which owns the Sportsplex, took over operation of the concession about 15 years ago, said facility manager Jeff Elliott, “and we’ve never been able to turn a profit running it ourselves.”

At the end of 2017, city council expressed concerns about the Sportsplex operating a food establishment and not making any money from it, Elliott said.

“So we were mandated from city council to find ways to eliminate that deficit.”

They tried reducing shifts, operating with fewer staff, making sure they were only using products that had nearly zero waste so nothing was being thrown out, and reducing the menus, Elliott said.

“We even partnered with local suppliers, like bringing in Forbidden Flavours, trying to increase our profits and adjusting our end-point pricing to make sure that we were … competitively priced,” he said.

“All of that didn’t amount to any kind of positive numbers.”

Elliott said the concession’s overhead costs and being unable to predict traffic numbers made it too difficult to continue.

A request for proposals went out at the beginning of the year to find alternatives for operating the space, he said.

They received one proposal from Anera Vending & Coffee, which also provides machines to Brandon Municipal Airport and the YMCA.

Elliott said they will be sitting down with Anera representatives to discuss the number of machines and what will be offered. He said the Sportsplex would like to see four or five vending machines dispensing coffee and other products.

“We’re going to work with the public to see what their requests are, too, to see if there’s items that we can provide that will meet those demands,” he said.

Elliott said while the seven city employees will be laid off, the City of Brandon will work with them to see if there are other opportunities within the organization they can move into.

“When we took it (the concession) over that many years ago, our intent was to make sure that we had more control over, you know, the quality and the hours of operation and things like that,” he said. “Our intentions were good.”

Forbidden Flavours owner Ryan Jacobson said the loss of the concession contract to sell coffee and other refreshments at the Sportsplex is not a huge part of his business, “but it all adds up.”

Jacobson said his Brandon-based company has had a contract with the city for the last two or three years. He said he knew that would be ending after the tender was awarded to a vending-machine company.

The Sportsplex was built in 1978 for the 1979 Canada Winter Games. When the Games ended, the facility was turned over to the city.

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