Guest Blogger–Shelly Duran

We are fortunate today to have Shelly Duran as a guest blogger for us!  Shelly is the Director of Dining Services here at Missouri State.  Our dining services and catering on campus is done by Sodexo.  I think you will find the food excellent here on-campus!  There is always a wide variety of menus and Shelly and her staff are always open for suggestions.

 I asked Shelly to talk about dining services…take it away Shelly!

Things I want to Know about Dining Services, but I Didn’t Know Who to Ask

Why can’t I share my meal plan with my friends? I always have meals left over at the end of the week and they just get wasted, or why can’t I use my leftover meals at PSU with the food vendors there?

This is a great question let me see if I can help clarify the reason why we don’t allow students to share their meal plans.  Missouri State pays Sodexo to provide them with dining services,  we know several things to be true, we know that a lot of students go home on the weekends, we know the participation levels of each of the meal plans and we know based on historical information how students with a particular meal plan will utilize those meals.  We take this information knowing that Missouri State is very focused on cost containment and knowing that we want to be great partners with the university and good stewards of our customer’s money and we figure the cost of the meal plans.  We base those costs on the fact that our students eat at about 80% participation (historical info), we take our costs and the numbers of meal plan holders in account and we are then able to give the university a fair price for the meal plans.  If we were to allow students to share their meal plans we would then have to refigure the cost of those meal plans at about 100% thus causing a minimum of a 20% increase in the cost of the meal plan. 

 What do I do if I want a particular food, but don’t see it out? Or what do I do if I think something is not right in the dining center?

Again 2 more great questions, the number one thing I want students to know about Sodexo is that we are here for them…everything else is secondary.  We believe that these dining centers belong to the students and every single decision we make is with the students very best interests at heart.  So if there is a menu choice that you would like for us to add to the menu cycle, please let us know.  There are a variety of ways to communicate with the Sodexo team, first of all if you see one of us in the dining room, please come up and ask, I can guarantee you that the menu suggestion (providing it’s reasonable) will show up on the menu cycle within the next week, if you menu craving hits you at a time you are not in the dining rooms, you can send any of us an email via campus email, you can send us a suggestion via our web or you can call any of us at any time through our main food service office. This same communication method applies if you are in the dining room and something just isn’t as you think it should be, please; please; please let someone know…it’s bad enough that we have caused you to have an unpleasant dining experience, let alone the other 1000 people that eat with you.  If you are not comfortable telling someone face to face that is just fine send us a note via our web page, email or a call to the main Sodexo office would be greatly appreciated.

 Why can’t I use my Bear Fare before 1:00 in the afternoon?

Several years ago when we first created Bear Fare we visited with the retail vendors to gain support from them for this new venture~~~ just a side note here, I’m not sure if you all are aware of this or not, but Sodexo only managed Grill 155 in PSU all of the other food vendors are subcontracted directly with the university~~~as we visited with the vendors one of the concerns that surfaced is the volume that we could potentially expect by creating this concept called Bear Fare and agreement was formed at that time that said if we were to begin this new program the meals would not be good until after 1:30 in the afternoon so that any of the regular cash paying customers would not be run out of the facility by the large number of Bear Fare holders utilizing the vendors during the noon hour.  There are 2 reasons for this, first of all the vendors give a rather large discount to the students with Bear Fare, The vendors get reimbursed only $4 for each BF served, but the value of the meal to the students is anywhere from $5-7, for this reason it then become financially vital to the vendors that the regular cash paying customers be maintained. Thus the reason for the time restrictions, please note that in fall of 2008 the due to customer request the vendors changed the time restriction for BF from 1:30 to 1:00 to better accommodate the needs of the students.

Well hopefully that clears up just a few of the common questions we get about dining services, as always if you have additional questions, please never hesitate to contact any member of my team or myself for answers.  We consider it a privilege to serve the Missouri State Community and look forward to doing it for years to come.

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