Whether you’re running a large corporate campus or a university, as new generations begin to advance further into their careers, expectations surrounding campus dining are beginning to change. Although the traditional campus dining model has been accepted for decades, patrons are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the food offerings these cafeterias provide.
By bringing local restaurants into your campus dining program, you can reignite customers’ enthusiasm. Instead of the same inauthentic cuisine and limited menu offerings, rotating local restaurant models bring authentic, quality food straight to your campus. Your students or tenants get access to endless variety and chef-curated menus, and you gain a powerful attraction and retention lever.
Here’s how you can upgrade your campus dining program with local restaurant partners.
There are a lot of benefits to bringing local restaurants into your campus dining program. Choosing real restaurant partners over legacy providers can reduce overhead costs while helping you attract and retain patrons.
By working with local restaurants, you build connections within the city your organization operates out of. This allows you to establish yourself as a positive part of the community, building trust and goodwill.
Additionally, the restaurant industry makes up a vital part of local economies. They draw spending and employ countless individuals. By bringing them into your cafeteria, you give these restaurants an additional source of income that can help them continue to grow. The opportunity your partnership provides could allow them to expand, hire more staff, and even open additional locations.
As younger generations continue to move into professional spaces, the need to examine your core values increases. According to a Fidelity Charitable study, 86% of employees want to work for a company whose values reflect their own. Young people want to know that they’re making a positive impact. As a result, they’re considering the ideals of the organizations they choose to be a part of. Making a visible effort to show that you care about supporting the community can be a powerful attraction and retention lever.
One of the biggest differences between leveraging local restaurants and working with large food service companies is the quality and authenticity of the food. Traditional food providers make all of their food with the same bulk ingredients. The stir fry at the Chinese food station is made with the same meat, vegetables, and rice as the toppings from the build-your-own taco bar. This makes the food feel less fresh, less original, and less authentic.
Customers can taste that difference. They know when they’re being served fresh, high-quality, chef-crafted dishes and when they’re being served generic cafeteria food. If they’re paying the same price for inauthentic replicas that they would at a nearby restaurant, they’re going to grow irritated and dissatisfied.
Over time, this can drive customers away, causing critical revenue loss. Those that stick around will likely be there out of convenience, not because they appreciate the cuisine. This lack of enthusiasm won’t do much to keep people on your campus, and you risk losing them to competitors.
In a recent Fooda survey of 100+ workplace and people leaders, 83% said that they believe it is important to support local restaurants in their food programs. By bringing in local restaurants, you provide the authenticity and quality customers want in a convenient location, drawing them to your cafeteria rather than pushing them to go off-site.
Because of their operating models, traditional legacy cafeteria menus are slow to change. Even though they often offer slightly different food options each day, the same meals will come around time and time again, and you’ll be stuck with a predetermined selection of cuisines. If your cafeteria opens with Mexican, Asian, Italian, and American stations, customers will always be limited to those few options.
Because of this, customers won’t get the opportunity to branch out and try new things. Eventually, they’ll begin to experience menu fatigue, and the lack of variety will become another factor that forces them to explore other options. The resulting drop in revenue can turn your program into an unsustainable resource drain. This is one of the reasons that 87% of the leaders Fooda surveyed believe variety is an important thing to have in company food programs.
When you partner with local restaurants, it becomes much easier to switch up the menu. You can bring in different vendors daily, regularly providing customers with new cuisine options. This ongoing change allows you to maintain participation over time, ensuring your campus dining options work as a competitive advantage rather than a reason to leave.
In addition to community and moral values, sustainability is becoming an important deciding factor for potential tenants, students, and customers.
Because their operations are so large, most cafeteria providers have to ship bulk ingredients from multiple sources. These have to be sent to distribution centers throughout the country before they can be delivered to each individual location. All of the transportation required to maintain this lengthy supply chain creates a massive carbon footprint.
It tends to be more cost-effective for independently owned restaurants to source their ingredients locally, making a local restaurant model a substantially greener alternative to traditional cafeteria models.
Partnering with restaurants also reduces food waste, as many dishes are made-to-order rather than prepared in large batches based on inaccurate demand estimates. This, in turn, also reduces your cafeteria’s carbon footprint, as food waste in the U.S. creates 170 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, according to an EPA estimate.
These factors make converting to a local restaurant model a noticeable addition to your organization’s green initiatives, helping you appeal to customers’ values, making them feel good about dining on your campus.
While it can be tempting to handle your local restaurant campus dining program internally, this approach comes with some downsides in terms of administrative burden, cost, implementation, and ongoing flexibility.
Because self-managed programs have to be built from the ground up, campus employees have to spend a significant amount of time and money building an operational model, leading to high overhead costs. Additionally, self-managed programs require extensive day-to-day management that can take time away from employees’ other projects.
Conversely, campus dining providers have put countless hours and resources into developing comprehensive, streamlined local restaurant-powered cafeterias. They minimize implementation and operational costs by hiring their own cafeteria staff, handling ongoing maintenance, and utilizing technology and cutting-edge point-of-sale systems.
Here’s a quick rundown of the differences between the two:
Orange by Fooda is a modern corporate cafeteria alternative powered by local restaurants. Through extensive research and development efforts, we have designed a completely new approach to campus dining.
Our unique operating model makes it easy to bring local restaurant partners to your campus, allowing you to improve the campus dining experience without adding unnecessary operational burden. Here’s how:
Fooda has spent years curating a network of 4,500+ local restaurant partners. Of these, 80% are independently owned. When you partner with us, you get access to your city’s most beloved local spots, allowing you to bring the flavors your customers love straight to your campus.
This pre-existing model means that you never have to worry about searching for new vendor partners. Instead, you can rely on our carefully curated pre-existing network.
Orange’s campus dining model runs on a combination of resident and rotating restaurant partners. Resident restaurants provide customers with a sense of consistency and predictability, while rotating Popups keep the menu fresh and ever-changing.
When you bring in new restaurants every day, you give customers the opportunity to continuously explore new cuisines, preventing menu fatigue and keeping them engaged over time.
Juggling multiple vendors can quickly become an overwhelming task. By partnering with Orange by Fooda, you can offload that administrative burden. Every Orange cafe has a dedicated dining manager that handles all day-to-day operations, including scheduling, staff management, and ongoing maintenance.
Our dining managers are experts in all things Orange. Their extensive knowledge and experience ensures that every day runs smoothly without the need for additional oversight from your team.
Orange’s purpose-built point-of-sale system creates a streamlined checkout experience that keeps lines moving and customers happy. In the background, our systems gather valuable participation data.
This information allows our AI-powered software to analyze spending and attendance patterns and determine which cuisines are most popular on which days. These insights are then applied to vendor scheduling, continually enhancing the dining experience and tailoring food offerings to your campus’ unique tastes. The longer your program runs, the better it gets.
The insights gathered from our point-of-sale system also help determine attendance patterns, allowing us to more accurately predict demand. The local restaurant model makes it easy to scale operations up or down based on these numbers. On low-attendance days, we can open fewer rotating restaurant stations to avoid unnecessary waste. This approach also ensures that all restaurants are open on peak days, preventing you from running short.
Ready to bring local restaurants to your campus dining program? Speak to one of our experts to get started with Orange by Fooda today.
What should you look for in a campus dining partner?
When looking for a campus dining partner, look for one that prioritizes variety, authenticity, and ease of operation. A good campus dining partner will offer new, innovative cafeteria models that allow you to serve delicious meals from real local restaurants without creating unnecessary work for your team.
How do you evaluate potential campus dining partners?
To vet potential campus dining partners, you should ask about their operating procedures, cost models, and staffing policies. They should have straightforward, transparent answers to any questions you ask, and they should have a proven track record of success. Don’t forget to consider the smaller details, too, such as their point-of-sale systems, staffing policies, and billing practices.
What new trends are emerging in campus dining?
Campus dining is beginning to move away from traditional cafeteria models in favor of dynamic, flexible food halls powered by real local restaurant partners. These models create a more authentic, engaging, and rewarding dining experience that helps maintain participation and interest over time. By implementing more modern, inventive dining models, campuses can turn their food programs from an obligation into a powerful, attractive perk.
How long does it take to bring local restaurants into your campus cafeteria?
This depends on a number of factors, including the scale of your organization and the way you choose to implement your program. If you choose to manage your restaurant-powered campus dining program in-house, it will take significantly longer, as you will have to establish operating procedures, hire staff, and coordinate with vendors.
Why is it important to support local restaurants?
Local restaurants make up a significant portion of the local economy. They contribute to revenue flow and create countless job opportunities. By supporting them, you can foster positive community connections, build goodwill, and ensure that the neighborhood you operate out of continues to thrive.
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