Campus meals, locked and loaded

For college students hurrying across campus from one class to the next, meals may not be the highest priority. They may opt for 30 extra minutes of sleep in their residence hall instead of allotting time to get to a dining hall for breakfast before a class. They may find it necessary to sign up for an essential class even though the schedule puts them in a corner of the campus without any convenient lunch options.

But for food and dining operations at universities, meals—and getting students to eat them—are a top priority. That means not only offering food options that appeal to students’ taste buds, but also providing dining services that can compete with the speed and convenience of restaurants and stores off campus.

“We offer different plans for students to choose because not everyone will wake up at 7 a.m., go to the cafeteria and eat breakfast,” says Vedda Hsu, director of university dining services at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. “We know they will probably just grab a cup of coffee from Starbucks on the way to class and later grab a piece of fruit from convenience store.”

Oklahoma State and many other college campuses, populated by thousands of tech-savvy students with powerful computers in their pockets, have recognized that they can take advantage of some of that technology to modernize their food operations and adapt to the lifestyles of 21st-century students.

Getting smart

Specifically, colleges and universities are embracing smart lockers that enable students or others on campus to order food remotely over the internet and retrieve it quickly and securely from a locker assigned to them.

“What we’re basically doing here is trying to shorten the time so a student doesn’t have to wait in line when there’s only 10 or 15 minutes between classes,” says Kirk Rodriguez, senior director for hospitality services at Texas Tech University, which has installed smart food lockers in its Student Union Building for people ordering sandwiches.

The ordering process will be familiar to anyone who uses apps on a mobile phone to order food ahead of time. A customer orders food and chooses where and when to pick it up. Instead of going through a drive-through line or interacting with a restaurant worker to retrieve a food order, the customer is sent a code that unlocks the locker where the food has been placed. Students with university dining accounts can link the ordering app to their accounts, and the meal costs are automatically deducted.

“They can be walking from one building to another, or just coming through the Union,” Rodriguez says. “They just make their order, they’re notified that it’s ready, they pick it up and off they go.”

And because each student specifies on the app how he or she wants the food prepared, mistakes are reduced. “It lessens the errors preparing the food because the customers are designing their orders exactly how they want it,” Rodriguez says.

Incorporating food lockers into a school’s dining operations may enhance safety; having fewer people involved in preparing, serving and delivering food reduces the chances of spreading illness and disease. Since the Covid-19 pandemic heightened people’s awareness of germs and avoiding risky interactions, using smart food lockers for contactless deliveries has grown in popularity.

The contactless delivery that smart lockers enable also is likely to result in more efficient deployment of dining staff. Workers who otherwise would be stationed at a counter to take orders and give the food to the waiting customer can instead be working in the kitchen preparing food.

Friendly ghosts

The food lockers also enable a dining operation to dabble in the “ghost kitchen” concept, also known as a virtual kitchen, where meals are prepared for delivery or pickup and there is no need for dining rooms or servers.

At Oklahoma State, its newly opened dining facility, Central Marketplace, incorporates 32 smart food lockers and a ghost kitchen concept as it tries to meet the demands and preferences of modern, on-the-go students. Planning for new facility coincided with the Covid-19 outbreak and

“During Covid, we heard a lot about food lockers and ghost kitchens and how we can utilize our kitchen space, how we can be more flexible and offer more food options for students,” Hsu says. “We put the technology at the front end with smart lockers, and in the back end we have full kitchen support.”

The food locker operation, called BYTE, offers students about 10 types of cuisine, including Italian, barbecue, vegetarian, tacos, chicken wings, wraps and desserts. More options may be added as the new facility settles in.

“It’s just like you see on Grubhub or Uber Eats—you don’t know where these kitchens are, but they can offer you different menu options,” Hsu says.

Food orders are placed in one of the 32 lockers for customers to retrieve. Most students pick up their orders promptly. But if food is still sitting in a locker after 15 or 20 minutes, the lighting on the locker will change, the customer will be reminded that the order is waiting, and workers will bring the food back to the kitchen and place it under a warmer. If an order is not picked up after a few hours, it will be thrown out. The operation processes 450 to 500 orders a day, and no more than two students per day fail to pick up their orders, Hsu says.

Students with university dining accounts pay for their meals via an app that deducts the cost from their accounts; those without accounts can use a kiosk in the facility and pay with a credit card.

“The reason I have put a kiosk there is for the older generation, or parents who are not familiar with ordering on the phone with an app,” Hsu says.

Early success

The busiest time for the lockers is between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., but the promptness of customers picking up their food and the efficiency of workers refilling lockers with the next rounds of orders means that the 32 lockers have been able to handle the volume of orders even during the lunch rush.

For now, Hsu says her goal is to reach 700 transactions a day for the locker concept. If the smart lockers continue to be successful, Hsu envisions adding another bank of lockers in the Central Marketplace or expanding the concept to other dining locations on the Stillwater campus.

“We needed to start small,” says Hsu. “Later on, we can always add on. We can tailor the cuisine to what the students like and add items to the menu.”

Eventually, Hsu would like to have all of Oklahoma State’s campus restaurants and stores convert to cashless operations, but not everyone is ready for that step.

“There are some professors who still want to pay for their coffee with coins,” she lamented. “But so far, what we heard about the smart lockers has been very positive.”