Insights

A closer look at mission alignment and some ways that can help you level up your dining program.

Key insights on the challenges faced by industry leaders relative to complexity in foodservice and the strategies they employ to overcome them.

Communication and collaboration are essential elements to a healthy relationship between a foodservice operation and a supplier. Try out these tips to help strengthen your operation with a more robust communication strategy!

In this blog series, we’re exploring the most widely experienced challenges for dining operations across the nation, and one of the biggest roadblocks to creating a next-level dining program is insufficient resources.

Use your data, those metrics, create goals, and turn those goals into an overall annual action plan. Then, measure those goals, track them, and continue to make progress and improve your dining program.

When the thought hit us that perhaps other facets of college and university might have a better perspective on the pandemic, we reached out to our good friends at Housing to understand how they are handling the pandemic..

With COVID-19 still dominating headlines and inundating us with articles like these, we thought we’d reflect on our interviews from before campus openings and check back in with some friends in C&U foodservice to see how they are doing, whether or not they were confronted with unexpected challenges, and what their biggest “brag moment” has been so far.

Clear and effective communication is the first of many challenges facing campuses across the nation as they gear up for a highly unpredictable fall semester. To get an inside perspective at what hurdles are presenting themselves, I touched base with two universities to see how they are building their communication strategies to reach students, their parents, and other concerned parties.

As July comes to an end, colleges and universities are still struggling to come to grips with how to pivot dining options and policies to best address the pandemic. While many institutions have announced fall attendance plans, it appears that specifics on student meal plans are still forming themselves to best fit the needs of a changing environment.

The impact of COVID-19 safety accommodations on menus is highly dependent on two things: a.) the campus’ resources, and b.) any changes in enrollment that cause services to be amended in the fall. Obviously, with unlimited resources, there does not need to be any impact on a campus’ menus.

In the last few months, we’ve had ongoing conversations with our clients and friends from community colleges to the Ivy Leagues for the sole purpose of sharing ideas and resources as we all tackle the challenges COVID-19 has set before us. Continuing with our sharing of themes from these roundtables, we’ve compiled thoughts shared by dining contract administrators as to how they are approaching new contacts or renegotiating current agreements in a COVID world.

With so much discussion surrounding how foodservice operators are planning new changes for the fall semester and beyond, we thought we’d take a brief moment to check into what current college students are expecting to find (if and) when they return.