FM's BEST CONCEPTS AWARDS competition recognizes and celebrates innovative thinking and practice in noncommercial foodservice.

Each year, our editors evaluate entries for scores of nominees before settling on the winners. The entries themselves are judged on a variety of factors ranging from their creativity to their impact on a given program and their effectiveness in achieving targeted results.

At the end of the day, the Best Concept Awards are about IDEAS — great ideas, innovative ideas, think-outside-the-box ideas — that allow onsite operators to manage foodservices more successfully and more efficiently and to better meet customer expectations.

The goal of the Best Concepts Awards program is to recognize these innovations and the organizations and teams responsible for them…

BEST OF SHOW

WINNER: BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY

Consistently Ahead of the Innovation Curve

BYU's campus dining operation has been an industry leader for a long time. Under the leadership of Dining Services Director Dean Wright, it has literally re-created and elevated the scope, character and capabilities of dining programs on the campus over the last decade, a legacy that will last for years and which has provided a model for many other schools in the segment.

Among other ground-breaking innovations, BYU had been at the forefront of campus convenience retailing trends, especially with its pioneering Creamery on Ninth, generally recognized as the country's first real campus grocery store. Many of its retail operations, like the recently opened Blue Line Café in its new business center, have also set a standard for others to follow.

Last year, BYU opened its landmark Commons at Cannon Center dining complex, a five station multi-concept platform designed to reduce pressure on retail outlets and motivate students who aren't required to purchase meal plans to do so. It also represents a leap forward in the department's commitment to sustainability with its emphasis on local sourcing (including from the university's own dairy and beef herds), energy efficiency, composting and recycling.

And the innovations aren't over. Currently, BYU Dining is moving ahead with plans to open a series of market deli concepts designed for restricted nontraditional locations on campus where they can intercept traffic and add incremental revenues. The concept, called Blue Line Market and Deli, will be made possible by a planned opening this fall of a new, centralized culinary production center that will bring efficiencies of scale to meal preparation while allowing the scattered outlets to expand their offerings.

BYU Dining Services Director Dean Wright at one of the stations in the new Cannon Center.

That BYU dining has achieved all this is impressive enough. That it has achieved it on a campus where the student population is older than is typical at most schools, and where only about six percent of the students are required to have meal plans, makes the department's performance remarkable.

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