The 2012 Best Concept Awards winners named

Food Management has announced the winners of its 2012 “Best Concepts” awards competition. The annual program recognizes exceptional achievement and innovation in key areas of noncommercial foodservice, as judged by the FM editorial staff.

Categories range from demonstrations of high quality, new and renovated foodservice facility design to menu innovation, wellness initiatives, convenience retailing and special event planning. The awards will be featured in a special editorial section of the August issue of Food Management and will be presented at the Penton Foodservice Group’s annual MUFSO Conference Sept. 30-Oct. 2 in Dallas, TX.

The top honor for “Best of Show” in 2012 was awarded to Stanford University for its new Arrillaga Family Dining Commons (see below), which is also being recognized as the competition’s Best New Facility design. In the view of FM’s editors, Arrillaga Commons epitomizes how a campus dining facility can serve multiple goals: building community, supporting educational culture as well as showcasing culinary talent and offering high quality, high volume meal production. Arrillaga’s excellence in several of the other categories recognized in the competition made it a standout candidate for the Best of Show award.

Individual category winners from the FM Best Concept awards program follow:

Best of Show/Best New Facility
Stanford University: Arrillaga Family Dining Commons

Arrillaga Family Dining Commons is the first new dining hall to be built on the Stanford campus in almost 20 years and was designed to serve as the flagship of the Stanford Residential and Dining Enterprises department. The 26,000-sq.ft., state-of the-art, two-story facility features a cooking suite as the centerpiece of its Culinary Studio in the main servery on its second floor. This is where students, faculty and staff can take cooking classes and watch demonstrations; the suite also serves  as the hub of the school’s Training Table program for athletes, where culinary staff customize meals to meet the athlete’s nutritional and dietary needs.

Arrillaga boasts a sophisticated menu rotation that emphasizes wellness, but not at the expense of culinary excellence. It offers continuous meal service weekdays from 7:30 am to 8 pm as well as a late night dining program daily from 9 pm to 2 am.

On its first floor, Arrillaga features a central prep and production facility that supports the high volume dining room upstairs. The first floor also houses a multipurpose room with a sprung floor that is designed to host classes such as yoga, pilates and dance, a group study room that houses a projection screen and seats between 25 and 30 students, and  a creative collaboration room that can function as a classroom, brainstorming space or relaxation room. Wellness kiosks provide students with information on keeping the mind, body and spirit healthy and balanced.