When Dean Wright took over as dining services director at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT, in 1997, the university had a nice, conventional, well-run program that everyone seemed pretty content with.

AT A GLANCE... Students: 33,000 Resident Students: 7,000 (incl. Missionary Training Ctr.) Annual Revenues: $41 million (50% from retail, 25% from residential dining, 10% from catering, 15% from concessions and vending) Meal Plans: 6,400 (1,800 mandatory, 1,600 apartment residents, 2,000 off-campus) Key Personnel: Dean A. Wright, Director; Stephen K. Nyman, Associate Director; Lynne Hansen, General Manager-Catering/Restaurants; Cordell Briggs, General Manager-Retail Sales; Aaron Black, General Manager-Concessions; Robert Zahrt, Manager-Vending Operations; John McDonald, CEC, Executive Chef; Roland Nelson, Manager-Purchasing; Chris Justice, Manager-Marketing; Mike Bridenbaugh, Accountant

“BYU Dining Services had always had a reputation for excellence,” recalls Wright, “but it was based mainly on service and cleanliness. The silverware and the glasses sparkled. However, the food was stuck in neutral. It was not a culinary driven operation. We were clean but institutional.”

Wright's mandate was to change that and build a dining operation that would up the culinary quotient while encouraging community, what Wright calls “breaking bread together.”

Caffeine-Free Customer Base

That's not easy to do on a campus with a student body not only somewhat older and more international than the norm, but one where only about six percent of the enrollment is required to buy a meal plan.

Nevertheless, Wright has set an ambitious goal to serve an average of 30,000 meals each day, which he figures is about one meal per student. He is very close to achieving that.

“To be a successful dining operator on a commuter campus, you need to set goals,” he remarks. “You have to ask yourself, ‘What share of stomach do I want?’ I know we can't get every meal, but I think we can get at least one a day per student.”

BYU's track record matches this ambition. In his nearly dozen years in Provo, Wright has methodically stripped down and rebuilt BYU Dining into a multifaceted, customer-responsive — and culinary excellent — machine.

Today, the school's $41 million program serves nearly 30,000 meals each day from a wide range of different service platforms, almost all of them bearing Wright's imprint: a multi-concept dining hall and a traditional three-meals-a-day dining hall, a retail food court, a casual dining student hangout, a fine dining table service restaurant, several freestanding branded concepts, a trio of dairy bars, a couple of full-fledged grocery stores, a prototype deli/market, even a museum café. Beyond that, BYU dining also manages vending, catering and sports concessions for the university.

Friendly Neighborhood Grocer

To draw customers, Wright must tap into the needs of a fairly unique student population. BYU is an institution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). Among other things, that means not just no alcohol, but no caffeine either (packaged beverages on campus are limited to caffeine-free selections or BYU works with bottlers to ensure there is a wide selection of caffeine-free alternatives). It also means the campus has had to forego that high-margin bulwark of many campus dining programs, the coffee bar.

BYU's enrollment is a little older than that of the average university because many students interrupt their academics for two years to complete church missions (up to 80 percent of BYU's upperclassman males have served on missions). Since those missions often take place overseas, and since BYU draws thousands of LDS students from other countries, the student body is extremely well travelled, sophisticated and culturally diverse. A remarkable 75 percent of BYU students speak at least one foreign language fluently.

To get their business, the dining program must meet expectations for culinary variety and authenticity. (To illustrate this, Wright cites a dinner BYU Dining recently prepared for the Robert Burns Club, whose 80 members had spent their missions in Scotland: “I would challenge any school in the country to serve 140 pounds of haggis to students and have them knowledgeably critique it!” he says).

BYU Dining must also deal with the fact that a greater proportion of the school's students are married, often with young children, than is typical at most universities because LDS culture encourages early marriage.

So, for instance, diapers and baby food are musts at campus retail stores, café locations all have to have high chairs available and BYU students tend to have less discretionary spending money than the typical unattached college student might.

To “build community” in such an environment, Wright determined early on that he would have to de-emphasize the department's existing cafeteria model and put new emphasis on retail at points of service where it would mesh with the habits of the student population.