Track: Undergraduate Student Paper Competition

Abstract

Waffle House, a chain of restaurants primarily located in the southeast United States, is known for its resilience to hurricanes. The Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA even has a “Waffle House Scale” assessing the number of Waffle House locations that are either fully operational, running a limited menu, or are closed, assessing both the severity of the storm and how the surrounding community is doing. To enable this resilience, Waffle House has strike teams of workers who can assist restaurants with both cooking and infrastructure, operations analysts tracking weather patterns, cookbooks that outline what can be made without grills, and teams of people facilitating major supply chain adjustments to ensure restaurants have the supplies needed to operate. In past storms, in addition to the obvious of stocking extra food, Waffle House has brought bottled water, generators, porta-potties, and even tankers with fuel, all to ensure that these communities will have warm food. These tactics are not unique to Waffle House, with Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Walmart adjusting their supply chains to help communities prepare for natural disasters.