Q:Tell us about what you have been doing to get the students’ opinions involved in dining services.
A: One, we try to promote all of our events. We are being more aggressive with the social media posts, we are using the school’s daily digest to promote occurrences and different specials that are happening in the dining halls. We have what we call a student culinary council, we meet once a month, that involves 15-20 students that come have dinner with us and talk about dining services. We prevent different industry information, we shared some food trends with them at the last meeting, we shared different food trends that are going on on college campuses and we talk about anything specific to Winthrop dining services. There are some questions and answers, a little bit of back and forth on things that they would like improvements on or things that they like. Sometimes we put flip charts up at the door of thomson that will say things like ‘what is your favorite food?’ so students can come up and write what their favorite food item and we pull different examples of foods that were written on the flip chart and we will organize a menu around that and promote that, so they know that they are listening to what you are asking us. We are trying to be more active and engaged with the students around the dining services program.
Q: Will to-go boxes make a return to Thomson Cafe?
A: At the time, we do not and will not have to-go boxes. The reason for that is that the meal plans are designed for ultimate flexibility. We are open from 7:30AM-9:30PM and we never close; whereas some schools have meal plans were they have specific dining hours, we stay open continuously which gives students a lot of opportunities to come in and have their meals. Secondly, all of the retail is to-go, so if you don’t want to get Thomson and you want a to-go meal, you can go to any of the retail options and get a meal to go. The third thing that we’ve done in terms of having a portable meal option is that we have what we call Simply To Go meals out of the Eagle’s Nest store. So in lieu of coming into Thomson and swiping your card you can swipe your meal plan card in Eagle Nest and get a to go meal there and it’s a variety of salad, sandwiches, chips, fruit cups, puddings and that sort of thing.
Q: Can students now use cafe cash for concessions at basketball games?
A: Yes, that is correct. We’ve set up all of our POSs over there which gives us the ability to take cafe cash.
Q: Will the Cafe Cash deal with Domino’s return?
A: Right now Sodexo does not have an will not have that kind of relationship with Domino’s. That is a national program that we are not involved with. We have looked into it quite aggressively and that’s just not something we are able to do right now because we don’t have that relationship. We are still working with the school to see if there’s a way that they might develop the relationship or contractual agreement and see whether that’s a viable option or not. So that’s been discussed, but I don’t know how that will eventually play itself out.
Q: Can you tell us about the new allergy free section in Thomson Cafe?
A: Simple servings is located in the grill area. We noted there’s a growing issue with allergens, so we have an option where the food is served in a location called Simple Servings and the food that is served in there is prepared in its own section of the kitchen so there is no cross contamination, and it’s basically food that’s free of all allergens. It’s a pretty simple menu in a sense; the recipes aren’t as complex as the foods you would get somewhere else because all of the foods that may create a reaction are limited in the production process. It is available to everybody, and we typically have an entree, a vegetable side dish, and some sort of a salad option so you can get a complete meal even if you are restricted in that way.
Q: There have been rumors about the removal of the campus Starbucks— is that true?
A: I have no idea where that comes from. I’ve heard that too and I honestly don’t have any idea where that comes from. First of all, Starbucks is a very busy concept and busy is good from our standpoint, so really that has no bearing in the truth. So the answer is absolutely not. It is our most popular program we have on the campus so we are only trying to make it better, not take it away.
Q: Can you elaborate on the incident where credit card transactions were being routed to the wrong place?
A: When the initial set up of the credit card readers in Markley’s there was an error made by the credit card company. They set those readers up and those transaction were actually going to a non-sodexo service. We first found out about it because it was saying Dunkin’ Donuts on the receipts, and it took a while to identify that all of the transactions were not going to Sodexo, but rather somewhere. And what happened as a result of that was that all of those transactions needed to be basically reversed so if you had a transaction during that period of time which was basically from our opening until maybe three weeks ago when it all surfaced, the transactions where then aligned with going to the Sodexo account. They had to go back and charge the same credit cards with the correct amount and then they credited back the amount. If you had done one you didn’t get charged anything extra, but it was no doubt confusing for the consumer, it was confusing for us, too. We worked with Sodexo, our credit card company, and a national bank. Once we had a complete understanding we put an email out to the community to explain what was going on. We fielded a lot of questions; there were some customers that had overdraft fees, and anyone that had an overdraft charge and we were made aware of it we reimbursed them. In the big picture, nobody got charged anything that they weren’t supposed to be charged, it just started happening without us having complete understanding of it because of the amount involved in it, and then we were just trying to play catch up with communication, so I’ve had discussions with the university and the university has had conversations with sodexo and I don’t think this will ever happen again. We need to make sure that if we are faced with a situation that affects our customer, we need to make sure we have better communication so that there is less confusion.
Q: Is there anything that you want the student to know about dining services?
A: We opened Mein Bowl up a couple of weeks ago, it is our new Asian concept and that seems to be going pretty well. We are doing about 110 meals a day out of there as well as about 60 sushi meals a day. We are getting ready to launch in early spring semester, a program called Tapingo, which is an order ahead program. You just download the app and you will be able to go to specific locations, and we are looking to identify those locations right now, and instead of having to wait in line that order is put together for you and you just have to come pick it up. So it is a convenience offer that the students can choose to participate in. It’s offered on a lot of campuses and we think it will be very popular. It will probably take us a little while to get organized around it. We are doing the logistics with the company right now and we are going to try to test a little before we close down for the holidays, but it may be after the holidays. That’s something that is coming that I think will be popular. We will roll out a new menu cycle for Thomson for the spring, so that’s always exciting. We have started the flatbread pizza program in farmer’s field. We are using those pizza ovens that haven’t been used in four years to provide an additional service, we have worked that into an eagle meal option. We are also looking to expanding or changing up some of the eagle meal options in Markley’s in the spring.
