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Dating website helps single foodservice workers connect

Dating website helps single foodservice workers connect

Dating is common among restaurant workers, despite company policies to discourage such activity. Recently engaged to be married, Leslie Bucher and Eric Webster kept their relationship a secret while they worked together at a restaurant company that frowned on employee dating.

Building relationships with people outside the industry is often a challenge given the odd hours and weekend shifts worked by restaurant personnel, and restaurants’ policies can discourage dating among co-workers, said Bucher, who with Webster and their partner Lee Briars develops online training tools for food safety and alcohol service. To solve the dating dilemma, the Baltimore-based partners launched an online dating and social-networking site for the industry.

Foodservicesingles.com caters to unmarried servers, bartenders, cooks, hosts and hostesses—the front-line employees who have fewer networking opportunities than restaurant managers and executives, Bucher said. The partners began testing the site in December and officially rolled it out late last month. Initially, it had about 400 users.

Visitors to the website can set up their own profiles for free, but to view others they must pay a monthly fee of $2.95. The partners hope to make the site profitable by attracting advertisers.

Does the site match up people?

Webster: We do not do that. We leave it to the user to choose a person. Through the search capability, you can drill down by state and find people who are close to you.

Briars: Others sites like eHarmony.com are expensive. We purposely made Food service singles inexpensive, knowing that foodservice people do not have that extra income for a dating site.

How did you come up with the idea for an industry-specific online dating site?

Bucher: We were talking with friends who are servers and bartenders, about how hard it is to meet someone. We had a friend who was using eHarmony but was finding it hard to meet matches and set up a date. We did some research, and there didn’t seem to be anything for servers or kitchen staff who make up the backbone of this industry.

There are industry-specific social-networking sites, but you’ve gone one step further.

Webster: It has all the functionality of a MySpace.com ; you can upload videos and photos and join groups. It is social networking, but we are pushing the dating end of it. That’s the core of what solves the problems.

Such as finding someone who works similar hours, but without violating company policy?

Bucher: You’re able to network and ideally avoid the issue of sexual harassment, and you can get to know people in a safe, secure environment and build from there.

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