Power Players: College stressing “to-order”

Pitzer College is a regular on many best college food lists, and General Manager Cindy Bennington of campus dining services provider Bon Appetit Management Co. unsurprisingly credits some of that to the long relationship—over 10 years, the last three and a half under Bennington—Bon Appetit has had with Pitzer.

She cites Bon Appetit’s emphasis on to-order platforms and high-quality ingredients for the high level of student satisfaction, which drives many of those best campus food ratings. Pitzer, which enrolls about a thousand undergraduates, strives to meet Bon Appétit’s corporate goal of at least 20 percent of product being sourced from local suppliers, though sometimes it’s a challenge to “get the product consistently for the volume,” Bennington admits.

Pitzer is one of five adjoining undergraduate Claremont College campuses, and students at all five are free to use their meal plan at any of the colleges, “so when you see a lot of the rankings, it’s not necessarily feedback just from Pitzer students,” Bennington says. “It can encompass feedback from all of the campuses.”

That, of course, begs the question, why does Pitzer Dining seem to get so many of the accolades?

Bon Appetit also manages dining at another of the Claremont campuses, while two others are managed by another company and the fifth is self-operated.

“One theme I hear students say a lot is just how accommodating Pitzer can be to them, and also just the choice that we offer,” Bennington theorizes. “One theme that my team and I have discovered is that students like to be part of the decision-making in terms of their food, so we make a lot of our stations interactive.”

Hence, at food stations like Chef’s Table in Pitzer’s McConnell Dining Hall, “it’s not just one protein and one starch and one vegetable,” Bennington offers. “You have a choice and you’re almost designing your own entrée, and I think that really appeals to the students at the colleges here.”

However, while the ingredient list at the stations reflects seasonality and what’s available for purchase locally, Bennington has found that familiarity and consistency also play big roles in student preferences.

“What we’ve found on some of the stations is that if you try to change [the ingredient choices] too much, they don’t really like it because they have a comfort zone,” she explains. “So, while they still like to design the elements of their pasta dish, for example, they [also] want to pick from the same dozen or so ingredients.”

Another aspect of the program that prompts positive reviews from students is the ready accommodation of special dietary needs and preferences, Bennington adds.

“We always try to offer vegan and vegetarian options, as well as gluten-free,” she notes, adding that the department works with individual students to ensure their needs are met.

Bon Appetit also operates a small retail outlet called the Pit Stop at Pitzer. It is a coffee shop with grab-and-go sandwiches and salads prepared at McConnell, plus snack items.

Two other retail dining outlets at Pitzer are not managed by Bon Appetit: the Grove House is a student center and art/performance/meeting space that includes a restaurant, while and the student-run Shakedown café serves sustainable, locally sourced dishes as an alternative to the other dining options on the Claremont campuses.

In her tenure, Bennington has strengthened the evening meal offerings, especially with more interactive stations.

“When I came in, it seemed that our lunch business was definitely the strongest meal period of the day, and what I saw is that we had a number of students who were going to other campuses at dinnertime or not coming in at all,” she recalls. “And if you look at what your strengths were at lunch, it was a question of how do you mimic some of that at dinner and bring people in at dinner.”

Mission accomplished as “our dinner volume actually now is stronger than our lunch business,” she reports proudly. “And we’re now working on doing some of the same things at breakfast, to have more choices and make it more of an interactive meal.”

As it is, Pitzer already has one of the strongest breakfast programs in terms of traffic among the five campuses. It offers an omelet bar, and the venue will intermittently have waffle, breakfast sandwich and pancake bars to provide variety with customization options.

Students living on the Pitzer campus are generally required to purchase a meal plan of either 12 or 16 meals a week, while commuters have an optional five-meals-a-week plan.