Experience of a Lifetime

I receive many inquiries about sustainability and our sustainable practices at Dining Services.  Sustainability has a variety of meanings.  Sometimes it’s used to refer to environmental concerns.  Sometimes it’s used to refer to nutrition and healthy food choices.  Sometimes it’s used to refer to social and ethical concerns around food production.  I tend to look at it from the perspective of, “What do I have control over and how can Dining Services purchasing and menu decisions impact the overall health of the OSU community while at the same time not becoming the Food Dictator?”

Fortunately OSU has taken a strong lead in sustainability issues and I’ve had the opportunity to speak in a variety of forums on sustainable practices in college food service.  While I’m flattered to be asked to speak, that doesn’t make me an expert.  It is something that I care about and continue to learn about and my opinions and beliefs have changed over time.

But let me share with you some of the things we are doing.  For the past several years we have been involved in composting pre-consumer waste.  This is food waste like damaged lettuce leaves that are removed prior to cleaning and chopping lettuce for the salad bars.  It includes carrot peels and all vegetable waste that occurs during the production of the over 2 million meals we prepare and serve each year.  For several years we have been requesting the opportunity to compost post-consumer waste which involves composting food and bio-degradeable food containers.  The regulations governing post-consumer waste are very strict.  The concern has to do with introducing human pathogens back into the soil and potentially resulting in contamination of food grown in that soil.  However, Allied Waste, our local garbage collector, has a composting program and we are working with them on a trial basis doing post-consumer waste composting at Marketplace West.  This has the potential of removing a significant amount of waste from the landfill as well as for providing local farmers with a nutrient rich source of compost for organic crops.

As part of this research we are converting our to-go containers to bio-degradeable products.  We are working with a local Corvallis company, Ecnow Tech, to provide and develop products for the food service industry.  This process of conversion will take place over a few years as there are still some product solutions that need to be developed.

Another area where I receive lots of questions has to do with shrinking our carbon footprint by buying locally.  We buy our beef from Country Natural Beef and other local ranches.  We also buy our pork and lamb from local ranchers.  The vast majority of our dairy products are Oregon products.  Our bread is local.  Much of our produce is grown locally, especially products we serve during the Oregon growing season.  Our first priority in purchasing is to buy local when possible, and organic when cost effective and practical.  Even if products like coffee are grown at significant distances from Corvallis we work with local roasters like Allann Brothers and Starbucks who utilize fair trade practices.

There’s lots of other stuff we are doing, so if you have questions don’t hesitate to shoot me and email or give me a call.

Best regards,

Rich Turnbull

Associate Director

University Housing And Dining Services

Richard.turnbull@oregonstate.edu

541-737-0689

Last week I talked about budget issues and the resulting change in hours.  After listening to a number of queries from customers we made some adjustments to those hours which were implemented on Monday.  In addition to customer feedback about dining hours, we also hear much feedback about the need for nutrition information in our dining centers.  This fall we have begun posting calorie information on menu boards, as well as posting full nutrition labels online for our regular menu items.  We are presently working on updating the nutritional information for all items on our menus, which are posted on the web at  http://oregonstate.edu/uhds/dining/menus/

Tara Sanders, the Registered Dietician for University Housing and Dining Services, will be working over the next several months to continue to update the nutrition information on the website.

I thought you might be interested in what we’ve seen in purchases this year compared to last.  While there are many factors that influence a purchasing decision, and I don’t pretend to claim that the posting of calories has impacted buying habits, it is possible that it has.  Here are last year’s top ten purchases compared to this year’s top ten purchases (in order of popularity):

Last year

1. Deli Sandwiches
2. Pizza
3. Stir Fry
4. Calzini’s
5. Teriyaki Chicken
6. Scrambled Eggs
7. Cereal
8. Chicken Strips
9. Cheese burger
10. Bacon Cheeseburger

This year

1. Deli Sandwiches
2. Pizza
3. Calzini’s
4. Breakfast Burrito
5. Scrambled Eggs
6. Stir Fry
7. Cheeseburger
8. Teriyaki Chicken
9. Chicken Strips
10. Bacon Cheeseburger

This also makes me wonder if there is some phenomenal item you’d like to see on the menu that we aren’t serving or if you have a recipe for something you would like for us to prepare.  Our culinary team meets twice a month and are continually working on new products, new recipes, watching trends in the restaurant industry, and trying to bring to campus the latest ideas in food trends.  If you have a recipe idea, please share that with us.  We are developing a Recipe From Home contest and any recipes you submit now, we’ll hang on to and enter into the contest later if you’d like us to.  Also, if you have thoughts on the posting of nutrition information, we’d like to hear that also.  It will help shape our decision making as we move forward to provide more information on the products we serve.

Best regards,

Rich Turnbull

Associate Director

University Housing And Dining Services

541-737-0689

Now that we’ve arrived at or near the middle of fall term I’d like to share with you some of the feedback we’ve received from our customers and how we’ve responded. During the summer it became evident that University Housing and Dining Services needed to reduce our department budget by approximately $2 million dollars in order to fund renovation and facility upgrades to keep our residences and dining centers safe and livable. The largest expense in Dining Services is the cost of labor of preparing and serving more than 2 million meals during the year. Labor hours and therefore labor costs are directly related to the hours of operation. So to make the adjustment necessary to achieve the budget reductions required in Dining Services we needed to reduce the hours of operation. Based on last year’s pattern of customer traffic I made adjustments that I felt would yield the greatest labor savings with the minimum impact on customer service.

Every year customer traffic patterns change a bit and this year is no different. Some of the reductions in hours have had a greater impact on customers than we initially thought. I have been carefully timing the length of time it takes for a customer to be served in each of our restaurants, monitoring sales in each of our 17 restaurants in 15 minute increments, and have read carefully the comments that have been submitted to our online feedback form. Before making further adjustments to changes in operational hours I asked each of our managers to hold off until the drop/add dates had passed and then to recommend to me, based on their observations and the feedback you’ve given us, what hours if any should be added back or modified.

I now have that information and would like to share that with you. At McNary Dining Center RainTree Coffee Co. will open a half hour earlier at 7:00am and close a half hour earlier at 3:30pm. At Marketplace West EBGB’s will also open a half hour earlier at 7:00am. Clubhouse Deli will stay open an hour longer until 7:00pm. Tomassito’s will stay open on Sunday’s an additional half hour until 7:30pm. At Arnold Center the Bistro will close a half hour earlier at lunch at 3:00pm, allowing us to keep Cascadia Market open an hour later until 10:00pm. These adjustments will be implemented by November 1st. I believe we can make these adjustments and still achieve our goal of reducing expenses of the Dining program by about $1 million. This has a significant impact on helping University Housing and Dining Services minimize rate increases for living on campus.