Kiosks used on the Duke University campus can be locked down at night and then re-opened for business hours.

It's easy to see what's exciting about projects that involve building splashy, sleek, spanking-new, state-of-the-art, mega-buck foodservice facilities. But the truth is, many foodservice operators can wait their entire professional lives for the chance to build a big project from the ground up; most never get that opportunity.

On the other hand, if you want to hear some gee-whiz excitement that's not dependent on a big budget, go to the other end of the size spectrum and ask operators about their carts, kiosks and “hole-in-the-wall” retail concepts. For onsite operators these days, small is not just beautiful — it can be drop-dead gorgeous.

Small is beautiful

Just ask Robert Rizzuto, director of dining services at New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), Westbury, Long Island, who is using such concepts with great success. A coffee bar kiosk installed in NYIT's medical building alleviated the traffic problems at its main servery, and gave students and staff an attractive quick-service option between classes and captured new revenue dollars.

A second kiosk at NYIT's New York City campus is providing interim foodservice and its own revenue stream while a full-service casual food outlet, due to open next January, is being constructed. And Rizzuto is purchasing a third kiosk to install in an academic building where students balance books, coffee cups and breakfast items while walking from the parking lot to morning classes. That kiosk would also provide service during morning class breaks.

Mujo’s, a coffee concept at the University of Michigan’s library, is profitable and popular.

Or, ask Jim Wulforst, dining services director at Duke University, Durham, NC, about some of the winning town-gown alliances he's forged by installing four popular local food vendors in free-standing kiosks on a campus plaza walkway over which 7,000 people travel each day.

“For the vendors, it is a nice opportunity to present their brands to the Duke community and the concepts bring a level of fun, activity and almost carnival excitement to the plaza,” says Wulforst. The concepts include Pauly (hot) Dogs, Victoria's Sweets, Cosmic Cantina burritos and Green Tango salads.

You can get equally enthusiastic stories from Dave Parsonage, Aramark district manager for the west region, and from Keith Soster, director of food services for the University Unions, University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Parsonage, who's been in the industry 24 years and seen a few trends, is excited about the new C³ — read that as convenience to the third power — that was installed in January at both ends of a sprawling aerospace manufacturing plant near Dallas. He describes the integrated system of attached, coordinated individual foodservice modules unequivocally as the best thing he's ever seen — “the first real satelliting solution in terms of offering the right size, quality and variety of services, and security in a very retail approach.”

MODULAR SOLUTION. Aramark’s C3 modular systsem takes “convenience to the third power.” This installation employs seven stations in a large Texas manufacturing plant.

Parsonage says the new system avoids the piecemeal look of the past where “Typically, you would order a mobile hot table, a beverage station, maybe another unit and line them up. The problem with that approach is that they would never really come together.”

In contrast, the seven C³ stations, with integrated lighting and signage, were installed in a single day in two former vending areas at both ends of the complex to deliver foodservice to employees who work too far from the main cafeteria.

For his part, University of Michigan's Soster raves about the Mujo's coffee servery installed in a three-story glass atrium of the Duderstadt Media Library. It's a stationary, 600 sq. ft. kiosk that last year did $454,000 in sales. The library uses its share of the profits to reinvest in the area, recently adding bar-stool seating along the exterior wall.