Carnegie Mellon launches preorder platform

Millennials crave convenience, and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh is taking steps to provide it through a new meal preorder option. Launched in February, GET Food is an application developed by software vendor CBORD that allows users to order and pay for food and beverages from select campus dining outlets and designate a pickup time.

The orders can be placed up to a week in advance, though no one to date has gone nearly that far into the future, says Mandi Semple, director of marketing for Student Affairs Operations.

“We have gotten a lot of positive feedback,” Semple says of GET. “We meet with a group of students every month through the dining program’s dining services advisory council. They love that we’re offering something like this for students who are on the go and in a hurry.”

After several weeks, Semple reported over 50 GET Food transactions since the program launch but usage has been growing by the day, especially among faculty and staff.

The preorder option allows students to bypass lines and wait times. Instead, they go to a separate pickup area where they can get the food after validating their identity with an ID. Payment is through several campus dining platforms, including the recently introduced GET Funds declining balance account option or a traditional credit card.

GET implementation is complicated a bit by the nature of campus dining operations at Carnegie Mellon, which consist of more than 30 individual retail concepts operated by a dozen different outside vendors, including eight local restaurateurs as well as management company CulinArt, which also operates campus catering. The school has no traditional dining halls, and an Au Bon Pain outlet scheduled to open in May will be its first national chain unit.

Currently, only two campus outlets—Tartans Pizza and The Underground—offer the GET Food preorder option, but a third is expected to be added in April when a concept called Rothberg’s Roasters II debuts. Semple says several more locations should be added to the program in the fall and even more next spring.

Of the two locations currently accepting GET Food orders, Tartans is a CulinArt concept, while The Underground is owned by local restaurateur Mark Hastie, who also has two other concepts on campus.

The fragmentation in the management of the dining outlets means the GET Food program has to be tailored to each vendor’s individual operation. However, Semple says she’s confident that as the program gains in popularity, it will generate interest from more operators.

“Our busiest dining location is definitely in the Cohon Center, the student center, and we haven’t implemented GET anywhere yet in that building. But as GET grows and we get more vendors interested in participating, I think that’s where it will have the highest impact,” Semple offers.

Contact Mike Buzalka at [email protected]