Aramark cooks up healthy profits, but lousy food

Aramark, Georgetown’s dining services provider, has sacrificed both quality and variety to achieve cost savings for itself, a fact that is plain from student responses to the ongoing Campus Dining Survey. The Campus Dining Survey, available online and on Facebook, provides a comprehensive and damning picture of how students currently view their dining options. For example, of the 690 students that had completed the survey as of Wednesday night, only eight percent were “happy with Leo’s.”

With the average cost of a Georgetown meal plan topping $10 per meal, students are clearly unhappy with the value they are receiving for their money. Meal plans are often misaligned with students’ needs and healthy options can be hard to find. When the University renegotiates its contract with Aramark, administrators must hold the company accountable to its students’ needs or seek competing offers from other companies who can.

Georgetown’s current meal plan options often don’t fit with student’s eating habits. With no happy medium between the 14 meals per week plan and the 24 meals per week plan, many students find they are wasting their money on too many meals or surviving on too few. The fact that students must eat their meals during designated blocks and cannot enter the dining hall twice during the same dining period guarantees that few will use all of their meals in a given week. Because of Aramark’s all-you-can-eat policy, any entry into Leo’s counts as an entire meal even if a student only wants to eat a single piece of fruit.

At other universities, students have access to an incredible variety of dining options and services not available at Georgetown. At Boston University, where Aramark also provides dining services, students have the choice to pay for an entire meal or spend fewer ‘Dining Dollars’ to pay for individual items like made-to-order sandwiches. BU also offers over 50 vegan meal options, a salad bar that includes locally-sourced and organic vegetables, and freshly-baked bread. For all these additional options, BU’s 14 meals per week plan costs only $92 more per semester than the comparable plan currently available at Georgetown.

Aramark provides avenues for students to offer constructive criticism of its services, but students often do not know the appropriate avenues to voice their concerns. Groups, like the Georgetown Gastronomes, who work closely with Aramark to communicate student dining input, should receive more promotion from Georgetown Dining Services.

Georgetown should use these results to pressure Aramark to commit to increasing the quality of Leo’s by introducing food options and services available at other universities. Administrators and students have a unique opportunity to affect change before Georgetown signs a long-term contract condemning its students to another five years of a barely mediocre dining experience, and we must proactively take advantage of it!