5 things: Unclaimed dorm food deliveries pile up during campus shutdown

Each Friday Food Management compiles a list that highlights five things you probably missed in the onsite foodservice news that week and why you should care about them.

Here’s your list for the week of November 9:

An interesting experiment in providing multiple-platform dining service in the coronavirus era is opening in Albany. Called the Cloud Food Hall, it encompasses six (eventually expanding to nine) food concepts with everything cooked in one kitchen by the same staff, all meals priced at a uniform $4.99 and all ordering done via the Cloud Food Hall’s app.

“You order off the app. You can choose your time. Pick up or delivery. We deliver our food with our own drivers. We’re going to start delivery week two,” Cloud Food Hall Owner Cory Nelson said. “You get a text confirmation when your food is ready, and you show it at the pick-up window, and you can either take it to stay, take it to go, or you can choose delivery and we’ll bring it to you.”

Read more: Cloud Food Hall brings mobile app dining concept to the table and New Cloud Food Hall: App-only ordering, all meals $4.99

A four-day campus shutdown at the University of Dallas that required food delivery multiple times a day to dorms resulted in massive piles of leftovers in the building lobbies where the food was dropped off. Campus dining services provider Aramark delivered meals three times a day for each resident at seven campus residence halls during the shutdown, but many students apparently opted for ordering takeout from off-campus restaurants, leaving the Aramark meals unclaimed.

Related:5 coronavirus things: College plans to complete major student center project to help halt enrollment decline

Read more: Aramark catering during shutdown leads to leftover pile-ups

The Rhode Island Recycling Club conducted food-waste audits in 15 elementary, middle and high schools evenly distributed across urban, suburban and rural school districts in the state and found that the greatest amount of waste occurred not in high schools, as might be expected, but elementary schools, with students there generating 0.48 lbs. of food waste a day (high schoolers, meanwhile, generate only 0.23 lbs.).

The difference, according to the author of this opinion piece, “has to do with hot lunch and the distinction between food offered versus food served. When food is offered, students choose what they want to eat. However, in Rhode Island, most students are served the same portion of food regardless of what grade they are in, which we observed to be approximately 1.1 pounds. In each of the schools we studied, first-graders were served the same portion as seniors in high school, the result being that almost half of the elementary school students’ food ended up in the trash.”

Related:5 coronavirus things: CDC says working from home reduces COVID risk

Read more: Opinion/Ratcliffe: Why on earth are schools wasting so much food?

Creighton University last month shut down a student-run late-night campus food service that operated between 8 p.m. and 2 a.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. The service, called Bluejay Bites, was created by business school sophomore Pete Cholewa to fill a perceived gap in late-night campus dining but university policy forbids the sale of anything on campus without permission as well as any business solicitation within dorm halls. The menu included fried chicken strips with cheesy bacon tots, sous vide Buffalo chicken sliders on toasted Hawaiian rolls with chips and a quesadilla with fries, all made in Cholewa’s dorm room.

Read more: Student-created food service shut down by CU

Companies in the greater New York City area have had the least success among major U.S. regions bringing employees back to the office while employers in major Texas cities have brought the most workers back, according to a report from access-control systems vendor Kastle Systems International LLC, which tabulated key-card and fob office access data from 3,600 buildings and 41,000 businesses in 47 states to arrive at its conclusions. In New York City, only 13.1% of workers were back in the office during the week the study was conducted while the rate in Dallas was 41%.

Read more: New York Workers Are Most Reluctant in US to Return to Office

Bonus: Delaware North keeps airport dining sites aloft

Contact Mike Buzalka at [email protected]