Back to School: Quality, convenience, tech and sustainability trends drive campus dining

How different would campus dining be in 2023-24 if COVID never happened? Given that the pandemic forced programs to embrace or expand tech solutions like mobile ordering and convenience amenities like pickup, takeout and even delivery sooner than many were prepared for, it had quite an impact that programs must continue to address in this and the coming academic years.

Mobile ordering for at least some campus retail outlets—and even residential dining halls in some cases—has been fairly normalized since 2020. Meanwhile, an expanding number of convenience-oriented technologies ranging from ghost kitchens and automated service stations to smart fridges, AI-powered vending machines and unmanned c-stores have been proliferating on campuses nationwide as programs look to satisfy the demand for convenient but high-quality food and beverage options in more places and at more times.

Tech-enabled convenience like this self-checkout station at a Texas State University campus store help extend service hours and locations while helping contain labor allocation requirements.

Tech solutions are also looked at as ways to mitigate labor costs and shortages while helping drive more revenue through expanded customer reach, an important consideration given that programs are still struggling to make up for dollars lost during pandemic shutdowns.

In addition to convenience, campus dining programs in 2023-24 are looking to satisfy student desires for food choices that are healthy, made in a sustainable way and customizable.

Related:Grab and go gets fresh and trendy at Rollins College

In this context, “healthy” means not only nutritious but recognizing different diet choices and restrictions, especially those concerning food allergies. As a result, station concepts designed specifically to serve customers looking to avoid certain allergen-containing foods, often through omitting the use of ingredients containing the most common food allergens, have been proliferating. They join a parade of specialized concepts catering to different diet preferences, especially religious ones like kosher and halal, as well as the long-standing vegetarian and vegan concepts which now are more often referred to as “plant-based.”

In fact, if there is a hot trend in college dining as the new academic year opens, it is probably the expansion of plant-based menus and concepts that have the twin benefits of being regarded as healthy for both the individual body and the planet.

In addition to healthy, diet-appropriate, sustainable and plant-based concepts, the other menu area college dining programs are actively exploring are ethnic cuisines ranging from regional American to a vast array of international choices—sometimes in mashup “fusion” formats. This not only gives students menu diversity and interesting new options but serves as a cultural education opportunity and as a way to make international students feel more welcome—a desirable goal in an era when the domestic student-age demographic is shrinking.

Related:NACUFS announces Loyal Horton, Sustainability award grand prize winners

Warren Wilson College in North Carolina has a robust sustainability program, allowing them to serve students locally harvested produce and meat, then use food waste to go back to the fields which grew that food.

However, while high-quality, diverse, socially conscious food choices that are conveniently available through high-tech service platforms help fulfill one part of a campus dining program’s missions—feeding the students—they threaten another almost equally important function.

One of the traditional roles of campus dining has been to promote campus community by providing communal socializing opportunities over food and drink, something hard to do when customers are remote ordering and only show up to grab their order and leave (or get it delivered by a robot, so they don’t even have to show up at the point of service or interact with any other human being).

The newly renovated (and FM Best Concept Award-winning) Selleck Food Court on the campus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) illustrates one way to balance modern tech convenience (and operational efficiency) with community building, which is by making the venue a collection of ghost kitchens that take only remote orders and offer extreme customization, but then opening up the dining areas to all comers, whether they are there to eat or not. The intention is to make Selleck a community space where students can come any time just to hang out, study, meet friends or make new ones.

It should also be noted that the renovated Selleck offers no automated pickup lockers, meaning customers have to engage in face-to-face interaction with staff to pick up their orders. That “personal touch” between students and dining staff—traditionally built up over months/years of daily or even multi-daily interactions—is another major contributor to the broader “campus experience” for students and one now threatened by labor shortages and impersonal tech solutions. Just how valuable a personable frontline staffer can be to a program can be seen from some of the stories related in FM’s recent Foodservice Heroes features (here, here and here, for example).

What may be evolving in campus dining is an approach in which human labor is allocated to high-impact customer-facing roles while rote back-of-the-house and routine operational roles (such as order taking) are automated through technologies currently being developed and piloted by major commercial operators that are expected to filter through the rest of the foodservice industry in the coming years.

The Hungry Herbivore gluten-free and plant-forward retail concept opened last September at Liberty University.

Another major trend impacting campus dining is the drive to sustainability, effected most broadly through local sourcing, food waste reduction and plant-based menu development programs.

Campus dining programs are seeing increased value in working with local producers, farms and businesses both as vendors of products used in the program and as additions to their offerings in the form of local restaurant brands augmenting the campus dining concept mix. Such ties not only support local communities but provide the dining program with fresh product and more variety.

An offshoot of the local sourcing trend is “grow your own” programs that use in-house resources like a school’s ag department or campus farm to help supply campus kitchens. Even more “local” are hydroponic gardens growing herbs and greens that can be located in kitchens or even in serving stations.

Food waste has become both a moral and economic issue given widespread food insecurity and rising food costs, and many programs are now aggressively addressing the issue through sophisticated waste tracking systems and excess food donation programs.