When 12:51 p.m. rolls around in the Knorr Dining Hall, the same chaotic group of students rush to the stationary conveyor belt, crowd the coffee bar, and race to the ice cream machines. The exit door of the dinning hall perpetually swings open as students sling their backpacks over one shoulder, carrying a brimming cup of coffee in one hand and a snack for later under their arm. Behind that swinging door, the dining staff breathe a sigh of relief — they have successfully survived another noon lunch.

Morning AJ’s Cafe coffee, lunch rush mayhem, and evening ice cream reward resonate with any Hillsdale College student. But these daily habitual routines don’t occur without a little bit of magic behind the scenes.

“Just like any restaurant, there’s always challenges with staffing shortages and order shortages. We order something that hasn’t come in, so we’ll have to pivot and change things,” said Adam Harvey, Metz Culinary Management executive chef. “The more that we can stay ahead, the more successful we can be.”

Jeffrey Cassell, general manager for dining services at the college, said it takes time and effort from every member of the dining services team to stay afloat and avoid falling behind. 

“For every full-time employee down there working, they’ll work from 6 to 2, with service from 11 to 1:30, so you’ve got 5-and-a-half hours of prep.” 

Work doesn’t stop once the day’s meals are prepped, though.

“Then they’ll prep for the next day, like the omelet bar toppings for the next day, and then they might prep for another station,” Cassell said.

Large-scale catering operations, like the dining hall, rely on a long chain of services to keep operations running smoothly, according to Cassell. For a college in a location like Hillsdale’s, getting that chain ready takes plenty of coordination prior to the beginning of school.

“It’s challenging because we’re in south-central Michigan,” Cassell said. “There’s not a lot of resources here compared to Detroit, Chicago, or Pittsburgh. Bringing resources in, trying to get staff hired, and setting up vendors in two weeks is a monster of a job.”

If any one of those links fails, the rest of the week’s schedule may be affected, Cassell said.

“Sometimes it’s challenging — we were supposed to get a U.S. Foods truck, our master foods distributor, and on Monday, because of the holiday, they screwed up, and they delivered on Tuesday,” Cassell said. “So now you’re a day behind.”

Dining services prepares weekly meal outlines to smoothen their workflow and have greater flexibility in the case of unexpected mix-ups, Cassell said. That way, staff can ensure enough ingredients will be available for use in affected stations. Planning ahead isn’t only beneficial for supply logistics, it’s also very useful for probing and identifying changes in student preferences throughout the year, according to Cassell.

“On the dining hall side, we work on a four-week cycle menu,”  Cassell said. “You got the same food, the same menu, but you have a history of what they had four weeks ago.” 

The four-week cycle allows Metz to keep track of diners’ choices and adjust the process accordingly. Designing a reliable one is especially important during the first month of the school year since that’s when consumer preferences develop, Cassell said.

“We base our ordering on history. The first week is always a struggle,” he said. “You don’t know, especially with a free-standing restaurant like AJ’s, if you are going to do 800 students for lunch, if are you going to do a 1,000 for lunch, or if are you going to do only 50?”

Many student favorites are already shaping up to be staples of this year’s dining hall selection, according to Harvey.

“Students always love anything like tacos, other Mexican foods, or any kind of Latin-inspired dish. Anything in a bowl, really,” Cassell said. “We try to do a lot of bowls without having it be redundant, and we try different versions with varied flavors.”

While catering to student preferences is important for Metz’s immediate purpose at Hillsdale, Cassell said serving the college is about much more than meeting those ends.

“Food is personal to everybody, so how do we accommodate the needs of the students with what we do here,” Cassell said. “We call ourselves Metz Culinary — we’re a culinary company, not just a food service. It’s personal to us, and it’s personal to the students.”

According to Harvey, flexibility with student meal swipe usage is one way dining services aims to put dining in service of the student body’s overall needs.

“With many colleges and food service companies, if you have an all-inclusive 19-meals-a-week plan, that’s set for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, Monday through Friday, with brunch and dinner on Saturdays and Sundays — we don’t restrict usage,” Cassell said “If you get 19 swipes a week, use them how you will. We really leave it open to what works best for the student based on their needs, classes, or personal schedules with athletics.”

Tammy Cole, operations manager for the college’s dining services, said a well-run and purposeful workplace benefits the staff as well as those they serve.

“That’s what we really strive for at the end of the day, because then our employees are happy,” Cole said.“They’re going to go home and say, ‘I really do enjoy my job.’”