QUALITY

Quality of Food Served On Campus



Quality of Food Served On Campus

Introduction

This research considers the challenge of planning food services on a campus such as a college, university, business park or large hospital. Food services are an important component of overall planning that affects the quality of life on campus. To demonstrate the techniques and methodologies with real data, a university campus will be used as a case study. The US Department of Education estimated that 15.3 million students were enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs in Fall 2001 (Matsumoto, 2001).

In the next 10 years, colleges and universities are expected to see enrollments increase by about 20%. University food service directors need to stay abreast of this trend and the resulting challenges in ensuring adequate food services on campus. The heart of this issue is estimating demand and determining an appropriate level of capacity to meet that demand, while ensuring high levels of customer satisfaction. Using the campus of California State University, Northridge (CSUN) as an example, this research presents a variety of ideas for meeting this challenge.

Since the 1994 Northridge earthquake that destroyed large portions of the campus, building projects have focused predominantly on classroom and office space; little attention has been paid to food services.

The primary goal of this research is to compare demand for food services with the capacity available, and also to do this separately and comparatively for various portions of campus. It proved surprisingly difficult to estimate demand patterns and even quite challenging to estimate capacity, and thus various methods were developed; each method contributes some value to the final result. Thus, a secondary goal is to compare the methods to determine their effectiveness in addressing the problem.

In addition, and in order to better understand demand, the student enrollment data used in the above analyses is re-enforced with data from customer satisfaction surveys. Thus, another secondary goal is to understand, at a fairly basic level, customer satisfaction with food services on campus. Final results will demonstrate whether there is a shortage of food capacity, and where on campus new food services should be located.

Literature review

Prior literature involving the location of food outlets on a campus is scarce. However, there is some general information about how various facilities have handled food quality issues and problems.

Campus food service operations have been evolving in recent years, in order to meet rising enrollments and student expectations. The students' typical complaints include bad hours, poor selection, lack of staff, high prices and few healthy options at the cafeterias. Complaints from Mesa, San Diego City and San Diego Miramar colleges included statements of overpriced cafeteria food, and food offerings limited to Taco Bell, deli sandwiches, Asian selections, grilled food, and pizza (Autman, 2000).

College trustees have been aware of students' dissatisfaction with the food services, so recently there has been more emphasis on careful planning for food services on campus. Several campuses have introduced innovative operations and menus. For example, the University of Texas at Austin allows students ...