Best Concepts: University of Nebraska dining venue combines new tech with a traditional mission

Built in the 1950’s, the Selleck Dining Center is the oldest dining center on the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL) campus. Centrally located, it was a popular “all you care to eat” location but was limited in its functionality due to its age and design. 

As the COVID-19 pandemic impacted campus, Selleck service was adjusted to an all-take-out concept. However, instead of simply keeping the same infrastructure, UNL Dining took an innovative approach and completely closed serving line access to students and turned each line into its own “ghost” restaurant concept, all while implementing a total mobile ordering system, which allowed students to customize their food order from the seven different restaurant concepts. For its innovative and efficient solution to creating a dining venue that combines technology with community building, Selleck Food Court has been named the winner of the 2023 FM Best Concept Award in the Best Renovation category.

The Grains & Greens station grows its own greens and herbs onsite in vertical farm towers.

“We converted each line to a ghost kitchen which prepared food for students to pick up from a dedicated front counter for each restaurant,” explains David Annis, director of dining services. “Once we assessed how well the ‘pandemic adjustments’ were working, and how popular the concept had become, we decided to make this a permanent change and renovate the space for this purpose.”

Since all food was ordered and paid for on the mobile app (using meal plans or credit cards), the venue no longer needed a front desk or cashier to serve as access control so the newly renovated dining room was opened to all students without restriction. With this change, it became a community center, an area where students can eat, study, or unwind between classes.

“To ensure we were still promoting our core values of building community and fostering personal interactions, we designed the dining space to entice students to stay and dine in by designing truly unique and fun spaces,” Annie notes. “We decided against using food pick-up lockers and created staffed order pick-up counters, turning to our equipment partners to help us create functional spaces where the food could be safely kept hot or cold for pickup.”

In designing the new environment, the program strove for familiar without being too overt, he adds.

“Being at the University of Nebraska, we wanted to give students a sense of place without having to use official university colors and logos, which can sometimes feel too institutional,” Annie explains. “Instead, we provided a sense of place in the form of historical pictures, a fireplace wrapped with a topographical map of the rivers of Nebraska, and pickup stations with Nebraska references and images from around campus.”

Selleck had a phased reopening over the renovation with the “back of house” and serving lines done first. The venue closed on May 14, 2021, and renovation started, then opened for take-out service only on Sept. 21, 2021. The following month saw the reopening of the north portion of its seating area, followed by the dining room fully re-opening that November. The last concept to debut was the Moxie’s Gluten-free Café station, which opened in August of 2022.

The last concept to debut was the Moxie’s Gluten-free Café station, which opened in August of 2022.

Beyond combining a food court “ghost kitchen” concept with mobile ordering and a uniquely renovated dining area that creates a new level of community space on campus, the Selleck renovation also allowed UNL Dining to reduce its staffing by 10 FTE’s, a 23% reduction, while increasing revenue by 110%.

In addition, over a million dollars in renovation costs was saved by using existing serving lines—which became the “back of house”—and equipment to create the the seven restaurant concepts, with even the Qdoba concept using the lines and equipment that were already in the space.

The last concept to debut was the Moxie’s Gluten-free Café station, which opened in August of 2022.

The numbers bear out the new Selleck’s success. In year-to-year comparisons in the NACUFS Customer Satisfaction survey, it has seen satisfaction scores for the space go from 3.93 in Fall of 2021 to 3.98 in the Fall of 2022, on a five-point scale. The financial impact has been even more impressive.

In the last full fiscal year before the renovation, Selleck served 219,113 students, generating $1.935 million in sales, which in the following fiscal year (2022) jumped to 399,552 with a gross of $4.2 million, bringing $762,000 to the bottom line. In fiscal year 2023, with the addition of Moxie’s Gluten-free Café, the program projects a customer count of 480,000 generating $5 million in sales, resulting in an estimated return of $850,000, an upward trend expected to continue over the next few years. Given an overall renovation budget of $2.3 million, UNL Dining is looking at a return on investment of three years on the project. “Campuses are one of the few places where large numbers of people from different generations mix and learn from each other,” Annis observes. “The fact that a 65-year-old dining center, a dining center that some of our students’ grandparents ate at when they attended the university, is once again the most popular and modern concept on campus just reinforces the special nature of a college campus.”