Under the guidance of a recently hired manager, Aramark has added new options in an effort to learn from last year’s mistakes — undercooked chicken, a moldy ice bin and a litany of other health code violations.
Pulkit Vigg, Aramark’s new resident district manager for Elon University, has been thinking big since he left a position at Mississippi State University and joined Elon last spring. Already, he’s announced the rollout of Argo Tea products in a new location in the new Global Commons, expanded hours at Qdoba Mexican Grill, planned round table-style eating at Acorn, added options to Green World (at Colonnades Dining Hall) and revamped the Varsity menu.
Qdoba will now be open from 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Monday-Friday, with a new 5-10 p.m. slot on Sunday nights. Vigg called weekend hours for Qdoba the “most-requested change.”
Varsity’s menu will have fewer restrictions on what constitutes a meal swipe. (Students in past years were limited to a half-dozen options with one swipe.)
In addition, Late Night McEwen is moving to a new home: downstairs in Varsity. A similar menu will be served, and the popular student fixture will remain accessible with an All Access swipe. The move is for the “safety of students and staff,” Vigg said, who added that the armchair area in front of the projector will be closed off during late night hours — which will remain the same: open until 3 a.m. Thursday-Saturday nights.
Junior Allie Kornaki who has a 300-block plan this year said she is not a fan of this particular switch.
“It just sounds weird to me,” Kornaki said. “I don’t think that it will be the same.”
Student feedback, Vigg said, is crucial to his goal of “getting as many students as humanly possible” on and content with the meal plan. Heather Krieger, Aramark’s marketing coordinator for Elon, declined to comment on the number of students with active meal plans, calling such figures proprietary information.
One suggestion Kornaki has for Aramark is to bring back breakfast at McEwen the closest dining hall to Historic Neighborhood residents. Last year, McEwen stopped serving breakfast when Lakeside Dinning Hall began serving it instead.
Twelve-thousand meals are served by Aramark each day at Elon. Growing that number requires regaining lost student trust, Vigg said, given campus concerns last year about not only the quality, but also of the safety of Aramark’s food.
Aramark’s food handling policies have not changed since last year; employees are still required to undergo first-week training and earn an Aramark “food handler certificate” before serving in any of Elon’s eateries. Mishaps, like last year’s widely-publicized incidents like poor sanitation codes, will not be tolerated, according to Vigg.
He promised to “show complete due diligence in earning the trust of students back” and establish a zero-tolerance policy for violators of food safety precautions.
But the food itself is just a starting point for Vigg, who said his No. 1 goal is to raise excitement by expanding food programming and “not just serve food, but serve food and service.”
Unwilling to give much away, Vigg hinted at more, better-executed, theme nights at dining halls — the likes of past Thanksgiving dinners and Cajun nights at Colonnades.
Neighborhood-by-neighborhood dining is the blueprint for Aramark now, with the goal of having students eat close to where they live. An added bonus, Vigg said, would be tying the meal plan into the campus’s intellectual climate, by fostering “conversation spaces” and slowing down the “assembly line” that can be often thought of as college dining.
After arriving at Elon, Vigg took a tour of local town eateries such as Pandora’s Pies and others in the surrounding Burlington area.
“I went to local restaurants and said, ‘These guys are going to be full. Why can’t we be full?’” Vigg said. “Our goal is to give [students] everything on campus that they can get off.”
The ambition comes at a time when colleges nationwide, Elon included, are more expensive than ever before. The total cost of an Elon education rose this year 3.69 percent to $41,914. Of that, the cost of a meal plan varies, but the All Access Basic plan — which all underclassmen living in dormitories, Danieley flats and the Loy Center are required, at a minimum, to purchase — runs students $5,436.00 for the year.
Students are not expected to shoulder much in terms of increased costs from added perks and eateries, according to Michael Bellefeuil, Aramark’s director of operations at Elon Universituy.
“We need help to renew faith and really bring options here to the next level,” Bellefeuil said.
There has been progress — a dining advisory committee was created by Bellefeuil and Vigg last spring, and they hope to expand by recruiting students to meet with Aramark to discuss what’s working and what isn’t, what students are still asking for and what the campus — dining manager is doing well.
But Vigg knows there’s still a ways to go to mesh what Elon dining is with what it could be.
“It’s not easy,” he said. “It’ll take a paradigm shift on campus to make it better. We’re taking baby steps and moving toward that goal.”