Page 10 - och1117_Magazine

Campus Profile

A Dining Transformation at

Georgetown

eorgetown University in Washing-
ton, D.C., has recently completed a
Gmajor transformation of its dining
operations to better serve its students.
“About two years ago, what we were recognizing is that today’s students
are very different than students in the past,” said Debby Morey, chief business
officer for University Services. “We were still serving an all-you-can-eat
buffet-style food format, but it wasn’t connecting well with our students in
the way that they move across campus and operate today.”
In order to find a service model that would better suit its students and
their needs, the university tasked Joelle Wiese, associate vice president for
Auxiliary Services, with leading the project. One of the first things done
was to hire Envision Strategies as foodservice consultants.
“We went through the process — really looking at the global palates and
where our students are relative to the industry, and where our foodservice
locations were on campus, where our offerings were — and really tried to
do a revamping, looking holistically at food on campus,” said Wiese. “That
is the part where we had the consultants in to walk us through that and see
where we were, and how we get from the current offering to where we need
to be, to what students are looking for, not only in the next three years,
but in the next five years and 10 years. We wanted to build a program that
would be very flexible, so from an equipment perspective, from a meal
plan program perspective, to have that flexibility to be able to change
and shift slightly to best meet the needs of the students of that time.”
They also spoke with students through focus groups and town halls.
“Some of what came out of that is that students wanted more custom-
ization, they had far greater global palates,” said Morey. “They wanted
portability, flexibility and transparency into the food that was being made
for them. They also wanted to have an update to the meal plan with meal
exchange options and flexibility of where they can use them.”
After a request-for-proposal (RFP) process, the university made the
decision to stay with Aramark, which had been its campus foodservice provider since 2008.
Changing the campus service model meant extensive changes to the venues on campus. “We basically took
most of our foodservice operations and went back to the studs,” said
Wiese. “We did that over a very short period of time.”
Leo’s Dining Hall, which had two floors of all-you-can-eat dining,
was transformed into one floor of that model, while the other became
a food hall. The lower level has the all-you-care-to-eat featuring
Aramark’s proprietary Fresh Food Company. “We took one floor
and dedicated it to the all-you-care-to-eat model because for a lot
of students that is not how they grew up; they grew up on Panera,
they grew up on Starbucks, they don’t necessarily want that,” she
said. “But it is very important for us, from a perspective of that
is how students eat when they first come to campus — they meet
their friends. It is important for us to have an all-you-care-to-eat
model. So we took the two all-you-care-to-eat levels and made
them one.”
The second floor is now LEO|MKT, a retail food hall with
six different restaurants.
Launch Test Kitchen is a concept that changes every week.
“The entire concept changes,” said Wiese. “All of the trade dress

10 | NOVEMBER 2017 ON-CAMPUS HOSPITALITY