Given her fondness for spreadsheets, planning documents and statistics, one has a hard time imagining Amy Beckstrom growing up in small-town Nebraska, riding a dirt bike to get around the family farm.

She makes this disclosure as we pass the vintage Italian Vespa in front of the Italian Cibo station in the dining hall of University of Colorado-Boulder's new Center for Community (C4C).

These days, Beckstrom has her hands full at CU-Boulder, where she is director of dining services and has been overseeing a restructuring of campus dining operations for the past half dozen years. Construction began on the $84 million C4C in 2008, and while its spectacular new, 53,000 sq.ft. eatery dominates the first floor, the center also houses many other administrative and student services offices and their relocation has opened up new residential space across the campus while significantly changing dining program dynamics.

Inside the dining hall, Italian Cibo is only one of ten themed restaurant stations, each with a distinct look and feel, menu and customer experience. Highly refined design features accentuate these differences even as the winding traffic patterns, wall construction and seating areas serve to separate each station's distinctive space from that of the others.

Other concepts include the innovative Persian Ghaza station, offering halal food (see the April issue of FM for menu specifics); Smoke ‘n Grill, outfitted with a full scale rotisserie oven, smoker and char broiler that produces everything from smoked brisket and salmon to traditional comfort food grill items; Asian Shi Pin, a wok cookery; a refrigerated Sushi Bar; Latin Comida; Black Coats, a small-plate demo station; and Kosher-compliant dining station.

The mix is rounded out by an extensive fresh fruit and vegetable bar — Wholesome Field — and an irresistable Dessert Display stocked with fresh-made items from the central bakery.

Outside the main dining area, a grab-and-go, a retail bakery and a late night café offer extended, between-daypart service to the large administrative and student population that frequents the community center all day long and outside of regular dining room hours.

Behind the scenes, the new facility also houses a new central commissary kitchen equipped with a full-scale bakery and cook-chill center that operates in a tight, HACCP-controlled environment.

The Center for Community building will be entirely financed through bonds that will be repaid from campus parking fees, housing and dining revenue and private fundraising.

Raising standards and driving efficiencies

According to Dining's Facilities Coordinator Juergen Friese, who worked with Executive Chef Kerry Paterson as project manager for the new facility, the center was outfitted with nearly $6 mllion in equipment, most of it new.

Friese, originally trained as a chef in Germany, says the facility is outfitted with numerous features to facilitate quality and food safety. For example, storage coolers are located near most stations to ensure restocking ingredients are kept fresh and conveniently available. Cooler doors automatically log temperatures and an RFID (radio frequency identification) system logs the location of individual pans and items when they are thermally scanned.

In addition to cook-chill production, the center creates bulk sous vide items (for example, cooking the shredded pork used in the Latino station in an extended, overnight cycle). Its climate-controlled processing room produces almost a ton of fresh cut fruit and vegetables a day and all the sliced cheese and deli meat used across the campus.

Executing a master plan

At first glance, it would be easy to assume that the C4C is one more example of the kind of upgraded dining venue that has transformed the look of college dining in the past decade.

A closer look shows that the operational efficiencies the dining hall makes possible helped justify the investment it represents. And both its culinary and financial results are built upon a program vision and plan that have been in the works for many years.

First initiated under former dining director Kambiz Khalili nearly a decade ago, its multiple goals included long term upgrades to the campus dining facilities, significant cultivation of departmental culinary talent and culture and a broad look at improving operational efficiencies throughout CU-Boulder's dining operations. Those ideas eventually undergirded a master plan that took broad aim at everything from on-campus redistribution logistics to procurement practices, food production and labor utilization.

It was Khalili who hired Beckstrom as assistant director in 2004, tasking her first with a series of in-depth analyses of many of these areas. Beckstrom was promoted to the director's role in early 2007 when Khalili became executive director of housing and dining.

Beckstrom came to campus dining via a roundabout route, after attending the University of Nebraska for an undergraduate degree in business and later earning her MBA at Pepperdine. She'd started in foodservice at 17, cooking in a retirement home. Before taking the job at Boulder, her career in foodservice management included stints in hospital foodservice, a Meals on Wheels program, hotel catering, retail foodservice, and several years as a nutrition director in a southern California school district.

“Kambiz gave me a strong team and very strong mentoring,” Beckstrom says, adding that it was clear from the beginning that the department was focused on driving change.

“One of my first assignments was to work with Mike Knapp, our procurement coordinator, on a re-engineering study of our procurement process and the truck fleet we use to redistribute food from our warehouse,” she remembers. “The campus is restricted in terms of large truck access and we knew there were savings to be had from better logistics.”