Nancy Heidtman, now Miami's director of dining and culinary support services, came to the organization just a few years later. Heidtman had been a regional manager with a full service restaurant chain with centralized commissary operations. That experience was to prove instrumental in the next phase of Miami's dining program.

An end to replication

FM TV VISIT MARKET STREET AT McCRACKEN. If you'd like to have a tour of Miami's largest c-store from general manager Diana Byrd, including an overview of its merchandise mix, go to http://food-management.com/video/0609-miami-university-mccracken

VISIT MARKET STREET AT McCRACKEN. If you'd like to have a tour of Miami's largest c-store from general manager Diana Byrd, including an overview of its merchandise mix, go to food-management.com/video/0609-miami-university-mccracken

By the early 1990s, Miller and his team had improved the quality of campus food and its production systems with better standards and “our emphasis began to change,” he recalls.

“Until then, most of our staff had been home-grown and had learned their skills on the job here. We needed people with outside experience to help us develop better restaurant offerings and do so more cost effectively.

“We began hiring chefs from restaurants, managers from commercial chains. We moved away from a model in which facilities basically replicated each other on different parts of the campus and began to replace them with branded and signature concepts.”

Operations at the Shriver Center, which had faced many of the financial challenges common to student unions, had been turned around with limited meal plan equivalency options and tighter management. Purchasing economies had also been gained by consolidating its food purchases with those of residential dining.

A move to refundability

Although some a la carte options were now available, Miami's main dining plan was still based on non-refundable “meals-per-week” plans and students were demanding much more flexibility than they could provide.

“Most students wanted a debit-based system that would work at all locations,” Miller says. “At the same time, some didn't want to be forced to that model. We had to find a way to offer both point accounts and meals-per-week plans. There were also concerns that unspent money in a point system would not be returned.”

Dining habits were also changing, with students eating more frequently, at more locations, over the course of a day.

“They'd become much more aware of what they were paying for food and labor at each meal occasion,” Miller adds. “Snacking between meals — the way we all do when we live at home — was seen as more expensive than it should be.

“Lighter eaters complained that they were covering the food and labor costs of heavier eaters. It also could work the other way, with heavier eaters paying more than their share of overhead costs.

“Our traditional way of covering overhead just wasn't working, and small changes weren't going to address it,” he says.

The department devised a dramatically different plan to address these issues in 1993. With it, a meal plan holder paid a flat rate per semester to cover a share of overhead. Remaining dollars, and any additional money put into the plan, could be spent at any dining operation on campus. Plan holders received a 30-60 percent discount on posted prices while those without plans paid full price. A separate “MUlaaa Dollars” account could be added to the ID card for purchases of supplies, laundry and other service options.

“We also took the position that unused points be returned at the end of each year,” Miller says. “We felt if we couldn't provide the quality, value and variety we promised, and students didn't use all their points, they'd get them back.”

That keeps the department focused on giving students what they really want, Miller adds. And even though it means a return of several hundred thousand dollars to students each year, it makes the meal plan much easier to market.

The system was very transparent. Although it required a more complex accounting system behind the scenes, the software investment to do so paid off.

In 1993, almost no meal plans were sold to off-campus students. Today, almost two-thirds of Miami's 8,000 off-campus students buy them, giving the department a much more substantial and predictable financial operating base.

The emergence of a branded culture

The new plan enabled many operational changes. “It was an exciting time of constant change,” Moloney recalls.

“We replaced sack lunches with to-go windows and ended up opening five of them. We opened our first branded grill and pizza stations and began to convert buffet dining facilities — there were 13 at the time, each one with its own kitchen — to a la carte. The new plan let us offer extended hours at the Shriver Center and we began to develop our own branded concepts.”