A student union food court filled with concepts that rival the best, big-city fast casual restaurants... Grab-and-go units across campus offering day students a true, in-house branded experience...A residential dining hall with choices that range from take-out “home” meal replacements to near white-tablecloth dining...

Generically stated, these could be the ambitious retail foodservice goals of virtually any large U.S. university campus given the high expectations of their customers today. But in execution there are few campuses that really meet the challenge in every single respect. One institution may have a spectacular retail food court while its grab-and-go concepts remain a bit hodge-podge in terms of having a consistent brand presence. Residential dining may be very good compared to that of the past, but still have students complaining it doesn’t meet the quality of what they can buy “on the street” from commercial vendors.

In an era when the goal of many campus dining departments is to offer the highest-quality retail experience to their customers, perfect execution always hovers at a receding horizon point. But in the just-completed renovations at the University of Washington campus (and in the remaining dining hall renovation still on the drawing boards there,) one can find a model that comes closer to that goal than most....

A total transformation

“Our goal was nothing less than a total transformation of how we prepare, cook and serve food on campus,” says Paul Brown, the university’s director of housing and food services

NOT YOUR MOTHER’S ALMA MATER: Customers have a wide choice of retail dining concepts on the U of W campus.McMahon’s Abundo and the c-store at Husky Den’s ETC.

Photos by John Lawn

“Even though our dining programs have followed a financial a la carte retail model since the 1980s, we decided to completely re-engineer them to become more customer-driven. That is what has resulted in the dining experience you now have on our campus.”

The largest part of that vision became a reality over the last 16 months, as the school opened its renovated Husky Den student union food court in January of 2002, followed by the opening of the spectacular residential dining facility known simply as “8” this past September.

Concurrent with those projects, the school upgraded its decentralized unit operations, developing clearly-defined in-house brands for them and taking full advantage of traffic and demographic patterns it identified in master plan research. In doing so, it effectively tapped most of the key retail trends on campuses today: from the state-of-the-art internet espresso cafe known as Ian’s Domain to wellexecuted convenience stores to high volume grab-and-go bakery and sandwich displays.

The dining experience these projects represent are a far cry from what existed on campus only a few years ago. And while it is easy to appreciate “before” and “after” comparisons, it is the process Brown’s department used in managing the transition, and the teamwork responsible for it, that best explains the success of the efforts so far.

Planning the transition

The University of Washington was founded in 1861, and although not a land grant school, has long been one of the state’s major education resources. Seven on-campus residence halls house 5300 students, but they represent only about twelve percent of the total campus population on any given day. The large transient population has given the university’s foodservice a strong retail orientation for years, but by 1995, when Director Paul Brown assumed responsibility for it, the situation he faced was a difficult one.

Though following a retail model in terms of pricing and payment, the actual dining options then available were viewed by customers as increasingly uncompetitive with those available off campus. That was complicating the university’s ability to position its resident programs relative to other schools.

Further, retail revenues had been decreasing even as operating costs had been going up. The possibility that finances might go into the red made it clear that dramatic changes were necessary.

Meanwhile, Assistant Director Dan Farrell, who had started his career at U of W in the mid-80s, had just returned to the department after a stint at the University of Colorado.

“As a department, we were completely self supporting,” he recalls. “Our ability to successfully appeal to the retail sensibilities of customers was critical to keeping the operations a financial success.”