BACK TO SCHOOL: UNCC to Open South Village Crossing
When students at the University of North Carolina Charlotte
(UNCC) return to campus for the Fall semester,
the brand-new South Village Crossing will greet them..
By the end of 2018, the South side of campus will see an increase of more than 900 residents, so the more than 50,000-square-foot facility was necessary. “The campus is going through a revitalization with the addition of new housing and refurbishing of some of the older dorms on campus,” said Roger Lademann, operations director for Chartwells, the campus foodservice provider. “They saw the need for a new dining hall on that side of campus. They asked us to collaborate as dining partners to see what they could do now and what would be done 20 years from now, so it can still be new and fresh.”
The driving influence for the new facility is that students want to know about their food — where it comes from and how it is prepared. “We have a bistro that has an open-air kitchen,” he said. “Everything is right out front. The students and faculty, everybody wants to know what is happening. When we started designing this with our designer Ricca Newmark, we said that we didn't want anything in the back of the house. We want people to see what is going on. We want interaction with the guests. We are in an education environment, so we should give them some kind of learning with food, so that is how we came about putting everything with open-air kitchens.” ...
DESIGN: Variety, Value and Quality at Stony Brook
Stony Brook University in New York recently completed
a two-phase restoration and new construction of its West
Side Dining facility, one that took student feedback as
a primary influence.
“The three top areas of feedback we received from students regarding Campus Dining are related to variety, value and quality,” said Angela Agnello, director of Marketing and Communications with the Faculty Student Association at the university. “Therefore, our top priority was to build a new facility that would support and showcase state-of-the-art food production that meets the wide range of needs of Stony Brook's diverse student body.”
The former Kelly Dining Center was first constructed 35 years ago, and nothing had been done to update the building's infrastructure since it first opened. The two phases of construction allowed the facility to stay open to continue to feed students. “The first phase is a completely new building, and the second phase was a remodel of the former Kelly Dining Center,” she said. “It is all seamless so that it is one big facility. The two-phase approach allowed for a dramatic renovation that provided fresh, quality cooking in front of the customer along with expanded variety, while allowing the facility to continue to operate. Over 5,000 meal plan customers on the west residential side and customer comments, both paper and electronic, clearly indicated that students wanted a number of things: quality in terms of fresher, healthier, tastier and greener food choices; expanded variety, including for special dietary needs; expanded hours to accommodate late-night study and socializing; and value in meal options that are produced fresh on campus and competitively priced.”...
Read more VARIETY, VALUE AND QUALITY AT STONY BROOK ...
ENVIRONMENTAL INITIATIVES:
• Georgia 100 Percent Compostable at Four Dining Commons
The University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens recently met a
self-imposed deadline of April 1, 2014, for its four largest
dining commons to achieve 100 percent compostability.
Now 100 percent of food waste in the dining commons is being pulped and sent to a Bioconversion center, where it is composted and reused on campus.
“Kevin Kirsche, the director of our Office of Sustainability, and I had talked about it for a while,” said Jeanne Fry, executive director of Food Services. “We started with a pilot program in June of 2010, where we were composting from two of our large kitchens, mostly pre-consumer waste. At that time, everybody said that they wished we could do this on a larger scale: ‘But we have all these plastics, these different PCs (individual condiment packages) in there, and with them in there we can't. It's just not going to happen.’” ...
• Maryland Opens Terp Farm
The University of Maryland (UMD) in College Park recently
opened the Terp Farm on campus to provide produce to
Dining Services.
“It has been an amazing journey,” said Allison Lilly, sustainability and wellness coordinator with UMD Dining Services. “There have been a number of synergies that brought together the grant proposal that we submitted to the campus' sustainability fund that funded the initial project.” ...