By Laura Cooper
Emma Backfish, a Stony Brook University senior, winced as she dropped a plate covered in tortilla chips, sour cream and crumpled napkins into the garbage during lunch time on a Tuesday morning in early October.
“I can’t believe I even ate that,” she said. “I know it’s bad, but we really don’t have a choice.”
Backfish’s concerns echo those of fellow Stony Brook students – many feel that the food on campus is both disgusting and expensive, but they have no choice but to eat it.
Stony Brook University has had problems for years with student unrest regarding food prices, quality and variety of food available on campus. Chartwells, which had provided Stony Brook with campus food for years, was infamously known by students for charging high prices for its food, such as the price of salad by the ounce. It was clear that students were dissatisfied with the service. When there was a new contract opening for food services at Stony Brook, it was not Chartwells, but Lackmann Culinary Services that won an excruciating bidding process to provide dining services in the campus for the coming years.
Officials said that the bidding process itself took months and involved meetings with potential campus food providers, trips out of state and drafting detailed plans. “The bid took place to be fair to all the competition,” said Dawn Villacci, Faculty Student Association representative and customer advocate in charge of organizing the bid committee. “We wanted to offer new programs because we knew students were unhappy with the quality of dining on campus.”
The bid committee was made up of 14 students, including undergraduate chair Abhi Bikkani. These students took visits to other state schools including University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of Rhode Island and the University of Connecticut, said Bikkani. The committee tasted food and interacted directly with each other to draft a contract before it was presented to Lackmann. The intent was to see if Stony Brook could house an “all you can eat style service,” which each of these colleges had. Surveys Villacci conducted among students suggested that a buffet style was something students wanted.
Chartwells, had its contract extended—much to the students’ dismay–to let the bidding process play out. “It was very important to explore all the options, we needed more time,” Villacci said.
After visiting schools around the Northeast and meeting with several culinary providers, the bid committee found that Stony Brook did not have a large enough facility to have hundreds of students eating at once.
“At Stony Brook University, our students are used to flexibility,” Villacci said. “You can’t bring things out of all you can eat. Our students need to be able to take things on the go.” In an all you can eat buffet style dining hall, leaving the hall with food is not permitted. As a result, the months of visits and meetings with buffet style culinary providers became useless. The committee decided it was more practical to stay with a full retail plan to provide more flexibility.
The surveys and interactions with students that took place with representatives of the Faculty Student Association found that Stony Brook students had three main concerns regarding the new campus food provider on campus. These concerns included having a more “hands on” customer service atmosphere, advancing environmental concerns and lowering prices on campus. A Meal Plan Resolution Committee was also created as a forum with the hopes that the new provider could fix problems right away.
“Students had many concerns but obviously, due to the economy, their ability to stay on budget was a huge issue,” said Villacci. “They’d either have many meal points left at the end of the semester or none at all. There was very little in between, and this made students upset.”
According to both Bikkani and Villacci, one of the main reasons Lackmann was chosen was because it provided the soundest plan to help students stay on budget. Lackmann is providing combination meals daily for a fixed price as well as displaying signs suggesting meals that are “budget friendly.” In addition to the signs there are placards by the register describing how many points students should have at this week in the semester to stay on track with specific meal plans until the semester’s end.
Both Villacci and Bikkani praised Lackmann for its work in crafting a budget for its students. However the small signs by the register that provide insight into meal point usage are eclipsed by boxes of candy, are outdated or are falling off. The signs are so small that when asked if they had seen them, six out of ten students said they hadn’t and out of the remaining four, two said they hadn’t read them.
Lackmann and the committee prided themselves on its program known as “three under three,” meaning that the meal was under $3 and 300 calories. These snacks include small wraps, fruit and desserts in on-the-go containers.
Villacci said another aspect important to the committee was the availability of “grab and go items.” After the research revealed that students had to be able to take the food with them to their dorms or activities on or off campus, the idea of fresh grab and go food was central to Lackmann’s plan.
According to Joseph Rudolph, the Stony Brook representative for Lackmann, the main idea was keeping all the food and production local in order to lower prices overall.
“Our motto is that we are fresh, local and focused,” Rudolph said. “We have moved the production of many things that used to be outsourced on campus. Grab and go is all manufactured here, and we began two fresh bakeries on campus, one in the Union and one in Kelly Quad.”
Though the idea was to bring higher quality at a lower price by baking bread buns, cookies and snacks on campus, students are not impressed.
“The food is not exactly good,” said Maria Del Mar Piedrabuena, a senior Women’s Studies and journalism major. “The other day I got chicken pot pie at the Student Activities Center and it had one piece of chicken and one carrot. It was six dollars! It was so disgusting, I had to throw it out.”
Lackmann also provides food to Adelphi University, Hofstra University and SUNY New Paltz. The company is supported by Compass, Inc, the same company providing money to Chartwells.
“We are two separate, independent companies,” said Rudolph. “Compass allows us to do what we want, they don’t interfere. They manage $20 billion internationally. They told us ‘Do your business, we’re here to support you’.”
Many students couldn’t even tell that there was a new provider on campus. While it was evident when the campus switched from Coca-Cola to Pepsi a year earlier, students seemed to believe the campus was just adding new concepts and not really changing anything comprehensively.
Living on campus, Frank Loiacono, a senior Engineering student from Manhattan, said he had no choice but to eat campus food. “Seven dollars for a sandwich is ridiculous,” he complained. Though Loiacono has a car, he said it is often hard to get off campus on breaks between classes and that trekking back to his dorm in Kelly is both time consuming and pointless to make his own food in such a short amount of time.
“I asked for ham and turkey, so they gave me half of each,” he said of his sandwich purchased from the Union deli. “They used to give me double the size of what a regular sandwich would be.”
Rudolph was optimistic about how students would react to Lackmann’s performance during its first year at Stony Brook University. “We encourage feedback with comments,” he said. “We have management photos posted and encourage that if there is an issue, to take it straight to the manager. It is very important to us to bring higher level service, service with a smile and to provide an eating facility that reflects these values.”
Lackmann is in the process of retraining the staff to provide “hospitable service” to the student body, Rudolph said. The entire staff that worked under Chartwells was hired under Lackmann. “We have to create a consumer-friendly culture in our facilities,” Rudolph said. “It will not happen overnight, but it will happen.”
For now, students say prices are high, food quality is low and food even runs out in certain places on campus during the weekend. When Rudolph was asked about this he said, “I did not know about that. It is important that students keep us involved and tell us about these things. We want to know what you think.”
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