Shawn LaPean in Cal-Berkeley’s recently renovated Clark-Kerr Dining Hall (Photo by David Toerge)

What ’s on LaPean’s Plate ?

ENROLLMENT: 33,000 ANNUAL MEALS SERVED: 4 million ANNUAL SALES: $47 million LOCATIONS: 4 residential dining halls,6 retail outlets

Director of Cal Dining
University of California-Berkeley

Dining at the University of California at Berkeley is not all organic granola, holistic tofu and hand-milled brown rice.

If only it were that simple!

In fact, the university's 30,000+ students and thousands of staff and visitors make pretty much the same demands for convenience, quality and value as at any other college, says Shawn LaPean, who has served as the school's director of dining for the past five years. And it is LaPean's success at meeting those needs as well as addressing contemporary issues such as sustainability that earned him the 2008 IFMA Silver Plate Award in the College/University category.

That success has been achieved in the face of some daunting obstacles that LaPean had to negotiate from the get-go, including an antiquated, much-maligned meal plan, outdated dining facilities, underperforming retail operations facing vigorous on-campus competition and a general lack of morale among the dining staff. (The latter had been aggravated by the department having gone more than nine months without a full-time director before LaPean was hired).

Yet in his five-plus years at Cal-Berkeley, LaPean led Cal Dining (the name he chose for the department to emphasize its new focus) to nearly double its annual sales from $24 million to $47 million, making it the fifth largest college dining operation in the country. Key to that increase was an explosion in the number of optional meal plans sold — from 399 when he took over, to more than 2,300 in the 2007-08 academic year.

LaPean has also upped the culinary component, modernized facilities, expanded some customer services, like extended hours, and added others such as an online grocery store. He also put the retail operations back in the thick of the campus competitive mix and — this being Berkeley, after all — made Cal Dining one of the nation's “greenest” campus dining departments by, among other things, launching one of the first certified organic salad bars on a U.S. university campus and playing an important role in the construction of the only “green” business-certified building on the Cal Berkeley campus.

His other achievements include boosting catering sales on campus by 220 percent in his first six months, spearheading a food court concept that produced a 60-percent increase in retail sales, and developing an award-winning website that serves as both a marketing and educational resource (for more on Cal Dining, see also the cover story in the June 2005 FM).

LaPean grew up in Bloomington, MN, near Minneapolis, and attended the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire.There, he majored in political science. His first exposure to foodservice was working as grill cook at a golf course where a brother-in-law was general manager.

After graduation, LaPean migrated westward, first to Tucson and then to San Diego, working his way up in the restaurant business, from bartender to associate manager in the W.R. Grace Restaurant Co. seafood concept Reubens Plankhouse.