On March 16, 2014, I wrote the second letter Bon Appétit would receive from a Hillsdale College student. “I am a Hillsdale College (Michigan) student trying to find a more nutritious/tasty food alternative to the ‘food’ they serve us now,” my letter read. “I am looking for an alternative to the current company that services the food at Hillsdale (Saga). I heard Bon Appétit replaced Wheaton College’s Saga a few years ago (Wheaton’s students rave about the food now). Saga’s contract with Hillsdale College is expiring this year, so I was wondering if you would consider competing with them. We, the students want to work with the administration in getting a better food service for our campus.”
I went along with Hillsdale Young Americans for Freedom’s petition (which got close to 400 signatures) last spring as a non-dissenting member of the board. So allow me to apologize for any possible mischaracterizing of Hillsdale’s administration. I cared more about the food quality than mandatory meal plans, but we needed a cohesive message to motivate students. However incendiary comparisons to Obamacare may have been, the petition likely influenced the administration to change food service providers (even if they deny this publicly).
But was the change worth it? Like any Hillsdale student, I know that Bon Appétit is not better than Saga, Inc. in every way. However, I would argue that Bon Appétit has done a better job than Saga in almost every metric.
The largest difference between Bon Appétit and Saga is that Bon Appétit’s staff treats me as a customer, not a student forced to buy a meal plan. In four semesters of Saga, I got the impression that Saga could serve anything it wanted and I had to eat it. This had nothing to do with the Saga workers; it was the fault of complacent management. I have seen more examples of workers willing to go above and beyond to serve the customer in the past four months at Bon Appetit than I saw in four semesters at Saga. While I have not worked at Saga or Bon Appétit, my conversations with Saga and Bon Appétit management have convinced me that Bon Appétit management really cares about students. Eating has become a “cooperative transaction” in Bon Appétit, rather than the “contract transaction” it was in Saga. After 16 years at Hillsdale, Saga had simply grown too comfortable knowing that we had to eat its food once we paid for our meal plans. Since Bon Appétit management knows that the last food service was let go, it works harder to please students.
Perhaps the only valid remaining argument against Bon Appétit is the transition away from self-serve food items, like stir fry. However, whenever I took the self-serve option at Saga, I always ended up feeling a tad queasy. I get the stir fry option more often, and I have yet to feel the same way I usually did at Saga. We have better stir fry, and less of the food gets wasted. There is nothing stopping anyone from going back for a second serving. And besides, I would wager that most Hillsdale students would prefer better-quality food to cheaper food.
