2023 FM College Power Players: the Midwest

College dining is returning to normal after the disruptions of the pandemic, and this 2023 edition of FM’s annual College Power Players listing takes a look at some of the prominent programs in the country with four geographical listings (East, South, Midwest, West) for the sake of convenience. FM had sent solicitation for information to about a hundred schools from around the country and received responses from a majority, which are all reflected in this and the other three geographically themed galleries.

We asked each school to provide an update primarily in three areas: what remnants of COVID era policies were still in place in their dining program, what was the status of pre/remote ordering on their campus and what recent additions have they made to their program in terms of new concepts, venues, technologies, services, etc.

From the responses generally, it seems clear that the college dining community is pretty much back to pre-COVID normal except for one factor: the pandemic has accelerated the trend to remote ordering to the point where even schools that had planned to cut back on this service were forced to backtrack in the face of customer demand. In fact, a fair number of schools report that the remote order option even extends to traditional residential dining halls, often with some takeout component—another pandemic legacy.

Here are the schools in this listing with links to their respective profile page in the following gallery…

Bowling Green State University

Indiana University Bloomington

Iowa State University

Kansas State University

Kent State university

Miami University

Michigan State University

Ohio State University

Ohio University

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

University of Michigan

University of Minnesota Twin Cities

University of Missouri at Columbia

University of Nebraska at Lincoln

University of Notre Dame

University of Wisconsin at Madison