Reading Time: 5 minutes
Key Topics: Bureaucracy Navigation, Revenue Diversification, Technology Integration
Author: Ann Roebuck, Vice President, Envision Strategies
Featured Interview: Lucas Miller, Director of Residential Dining Services, Colorado State University
Watch the Full Video Interview Here
Setting the Stage: Scale and Scope
Colorado State University's residential dining program serves over 6,000 students with meal plans, delivering approximately 2.5 million meals annually. As a land-grant institution established in 1870, the CSU is served by two distinct on-campus foodservice entities:
Housing and Dining Services led by Lucas Miller, which focuses on residential students with service through AYCTE, retail and catering, generally the western half of campus.
Student Center dining which manages the student center dining, catering, and satellite locations generally on the eastern half of campus.
This division creates a unique operational environment that exemplifies the complexity of modern campus dining administration, requiring sophisticated strategies to navigate institutional structures while maintaining exceptional service.
Managing Modern Complexity
For campus dining leaders like Lucas, institutional bureaucracy presents one of the most significant operational challenges. "One of the major complexities that I think all of us have working on a college campus is really the bureaucracy," Lucas explains. "Universities are obviously—people know the main mission is to educate, but within a campus, really, it's not just that. It's education, research, athletics and on and on, and commercial operations."
This environment creates a landscape of competing priorities where dining must advocate for resources while understanding its place within the broader institutional mission. At Colorado State, Lucas has found that relationship building across campus departments creates the most effective pathway through bureaucratic challenges.
"We're very relationship-oriented campus," Lucas notes. "What really helps is to know what the resources are across campus and who can help you and who can advocate for you and being able to be in the space across campus to tell your story."
The pandemic highlighted the critical importance of this approach. As dining services continued operating on campus while many departments went remote, the HDS team needed to effectively communicate their unique situation and needs. By cultivating strong cross-departmental relationships, they successfully navigated this unprecedented challenge.
Operational Innovation Points:
Lucas emphasizes the importance of taking "the long game" when working within a university environment:
Building strategic relationships across departments
Finding advocates throughout campus
Understanding the balance between immediate and long-term goals
Working within state laws and shared governance models
Maintaining realistic expectations about institutional change
"CSU has been here since 1870, so we can take the long game to sort out some of these issues," Lucas shares. "Us dining folks, we like to get things done right away, and we're very result-oriented individuals, which is what makes us successful in our business. But sometimes, when you're working within a university, it's really sorting out what can you accomplish today and what can we accomplish over time."
Finding New Revenue Streams
When challenged to identify new revenue sources beyond meal plans, Lucas's team leveraged data insights from Envision Strategies to develop an innovative solution: unattended mini markets.
"We rely very heavily on board [meal plans] as our revenue source," Lucas explains. "So we've been looking at different options for how we can both support our residential students and look at ways that we can bring in non-board [meal plan] plan funds."
The mini markets, which operate 24/7 through technology-enabled checkout systems, have become a significant success story. Beginning with a pilot location in a residential facility, the program has expanded to serve apartment communities and classroom buildings, attracting both meal plan users and cash customers.
"We just opened one not too long ago. It's been extremely successful," Lucas shares. "One of the benefits we found is that yes, it does allow our residential students with meal plans and off-campus meal plans to use that location. But we've also seen a tremendous amount of non-board plan funds come in."
This initiative originated from an Envision Strategies study that examined student movement patterns across campus, identifying "Zone 11" as a strategic location—a term that became the internal code name for the project.
Conquering Resource Hurdles
Like many dining operations, CSU faces three primary resource challenges: financial constraints, labor shortages, and operational limitations. Lucas half-jokingly summarizes these as "money, money, and money," acknowledging that financial considerations ultimately connect to most operational challenges.
As a land-grant institution, CSU must balance affordability and access against rising costs. "One of the main roadblocks that we have is sorting through how you balance what you charge for your board plan, and then how we are able to keep funding our operation and continue to move forward," Lucas explains.
The labor landscape has improved significantly since the pandemic's height, when applicant pools nearly disappeared. CSU has positioned itself as the "employer of choice" in the region by emphasizing benefits unique to university employment:
Paid holiday time (including a full week for fall break)
State employment benefits
Stable work environment
Institutional focus on employee wellbeing
These advantages have attracted workers from local restaurants seeking improved working conditions, demonstrating how institutional strengths can offset industry-wide challenges.
Data-Driven Performance Management
CSU's dining program employs standard industry KPIs including food costs, labor percentages, plate costs, and meal swipes per labor hour. However, their transition toward more retail-oriented operations has revealed interesting shifts in traditional metrics.
"One of the changes is in our missed meal factor," Lucas notes. "Our missed meal factor has gone way down, meaning our students are using their meal plans more frequently. But our financials, on the other hand, are looking good."
This apparent contradiction—higher meal plan utilization typically suggesting increased costs—is explained by the operational efficiencies of their retail model. "Because of the retail model, we're able to control labor and food a little bit better, [which is] still maintaining our financials to be in a good place."
The shift away from all-you-care-to-eat dining to retail operations in certain locations has not only improved financials but increased student satisfaction. "The number of transactions we have are way higher now as a retail operation than they were prior to the pandemic," Lucas explains, noting that students appreciate using spaces without "paywalls" as informal lounges and meeting areas.
Technology Integration and Future Direction
CSU is poised to take data analytics to the next level through collaboration with their Housing and Dining technology department, which is developing sophisticated AI and machine learning capabilities.
Their initial projects focused on residence hall occupancy prediction are expanding to dining applications, with two key initiatives in development:
Comprehensive KPI Dashboard - Consolidating data from multiple systems into a single, shareable interface accessible to managers and administrators
Predictive Analytics - Using AI to forecast meal plan selection patterns, providing more accurate budget projections
"Our ask is, can you use all the data we get from our students to find ways to possibly predict how many students will pick which meal plan," Lucas explains. "We take a lot of guesses based on historical knowledge, but leaning on technology to be able to pull all this data together, use machine learning or whatever magic they have...I see over the next few years, being able to lean in on this type of technology, to really hone in on what our revenues will look like."
Looking Forward
Colorado State University's experience offers valuable insights for dining programs navigating institutional complexity and resource limitations. Their emphasis on relationship building, strategic innovation, and technological advancement demonstrates how traditional challenges can become opportunities for growth.
Key Takeaways for Industry Leaders:
Build cross-campus relationships that create administrative advocates
Take the "long game" approach to institutional change
Leverage technology for revenue diversification beyond meal plans
Position dining as an employer of choice with unique benefits
Embrace retail models that balance student satisfaction with financial performance
Invest in predictive analytics to improve planning accuracy
As Lucas reflects on the rapidly evolving dining landscape, he acknowledges that while technology offers tremendous opportunities, the human element remains essential: "The data going in still needs to be understood and contextualized, and that takes expertise." This balance of innovation and experience will continue to drive dining program excellence at Colorado State and institutions nationwide.