Losses and Gains: Changes at HUDS

Beyond serving nearly 2.6 million meals in residential dining this year, Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) has kept itself busy with several menu changes and new projects to improve the overall quality of on-campus dining.

From generic cereals and a new bagel supplier to more fresh fruit and seasonal specialities, the main motivation behind many of these changes was to increase the freshness of HUDS food and make some menu options healthier.

“It is very important to us that on the daily menu everyone has something to choose from,” says HUDS Assistant Director Crista Martin. “While we do not advocate for any style of eating, we do want students to have the choice of foods that research has found to be healthful.”

In the early fall, HUDS switched its cereal from brand names like Kellogg’s and General Mills to generic brands, some of which are organic.

Director for Residential Dining Rudolf Gautschi says the decision was made “for a lot of reasons, including the many student requests for healthier cereals and the fact that we could offer a comparable product with price savings.”

The financial savings that came from cost cuts on cereals and other services allowed HUDS to expand its menu to include seasonal salad stations, deli meats at dinner, more fresh fruit, improved grill food, and healthier options such as whole grain pasta, breads, and waffle batter.

Although these services were expanded, HUDS removed tomatoes from the salad bar for two months, citing skyrocketing prices and poor quality due to the crop famine this winter.

In January, HUDS was also forced to find a new bagel supplier when Finagle a Bagel closed its wholesale business. HUDS settled on East End Bagel, a local bagel provider, in another switch away from a brand name product.

In order to determine what menu changes to make, HUDS runs a bi-annual survey to assess student satisfaction. A record 50 percent of undergraduates participated in the survey this year, which found “satisfaction to be better than ever,” says Martin. She credits the improved satisfaction rating of 3.74 out of 5 to HUDS’s seasonal menu that has “had an enormous impact on the food.”

Despite improved survey results, not all students are as satisfied with the food as they perceive their peers at other colleges to be.

“Some of my friends say they love the food at their colleges, something I don’t think would pop into the minds of most students here,” says Sasha D. Kukunova ’08.

HUDS has tried to incorporate student opinion into its dining decisions. This was the first year that students could vote for a festive meal and they selected a ’50s diner theme.

“This was a huge success and something we will definitely do again,” says Martin.

A new pilot program, the “food literacy project,” was also initiated this year to increase students’ awareness about where their food is coming from and how it is made. HUDS hired Jessica S. Zdeb ’04 to plan the program this year and to start projects within it next fall.

“No one is quite familiar with the project yet,” says Zdeb. “I would like to see it do a number of things, from organizing students to volunteer at local farms to educating the community about their food and how it affects the lives of the people who make it.”

This summer, HUDS will complete the final stage of its residential dining hall renovation with the Mather-Dunster project. It will also reexamine the menu to incorporate student requests from the spring survey, including the potential addition of pizza and fresh fruit to dinner, as well as tatertots to breakfast.

—Staff writer Carolyn A. Sheehan can be reached at csheehan@fas.harvard.edu.