In response to student feedback, the Fresh Food Café (FFC) has made some changes to the food that is served to students every day. At the start of the second semester, there were many new features implemented including a fresh orange-juice machine, a panini station, baked pasta at the pizza station, a revamped salad bar and cereal selection.
There were no cost changes in implementing the new features of the FFC because menu items were just switched around.
“We try to freshen up the menus, to freshen up our offerings at the beginning of each semester because any students that are returning will then feel like there is something new and different going on [here],” Director of Dining Programs David Furhman said.
Changes are usually determined before the semester starts, giving JHU Dining time to figure out exactly what changes they want to make. “Some of the changes take time to implement. Like the orange juice machine, we had to order it and then it had to get here; then we had to [start it up] and we had to get the training going on,” Furhman said. “So there is time involved and we don’t want to do that in the middle of an academic semester,” he added.
Menus are also determined before the semester starts. JHU Dining is provided by Aramark, a professional food services company. Aramark develops their menu ideas and then they are brought to Hopkins for approval. Aramark employees declined to comment for this article.
“We go through those menu suggestions and approve them and tweak them together. Then Aramark goes into a training mode to teach their staff how to cook the new stuff,” Furhman said. “So there’s a process, which takes time, which is why we try to do it at the beginning of each semester because it’s just quieter. At Intersession [it was] quiet here, so that was a good time for Aramark to do that training.”
Furhman took one of our writers on a tour of the FFC yesterday to showcase the changes himself, starting off with the fresh orange juice machine. “[We thought], ‘Gee, we’re doing OJ over there, which is a natural product but it’s from concentrate. It’s mixed with water. There’s no sugar added. So how can we make that better?’” Furhman said.
“So we look to see what other schools are doing for their orange juice, and low and behold we found this really cool machine that delivers . . . I mean you can’t get fresher than that.”
“It’s incredibly fresh and delicious and it is very true to our Fresh Food Café name,” Furhman said.
Some students, however, had a different opinion of the juicer.
“The orange juicer [is] a good machine, but I just feel like they could have used the money for something else,” freshman Dylan Adams said.
Freshman Tory Haltermann agrees. “I really like the orange juicer, but I feel like it excessively uses the oranges,” she said.
Students said that they did not need hamburgers and hotdogs every day, so that area was changed to offer an increased variety. “You’re going to see something different almost every day. So today is cheese steaks on great bread,” Furhman said.
Adams felt that there still needs to be a greater variety of meats. “They seem to spend money in areas where they don’t need to spend it,” he said. “ We could have steak; we need more grilled meats that take a little more time that they don’t tend to do that often, like the ribs, or the chicken wings,” he added.
There is also a station where students can make their own paninis. “We have a new panini station with fresh mozzarella. I don’t know if you’re familiar with fresh mozzarella, but if you’ve ever had fresh you’ll never go back. And so every day there is a different offering of bread and different fillings,” Furhman said. “These are fresh basil leaves, fresh mozzarella, fresh peppers, fresh onion for the paninis here,” he said, pointing out the ingredients.
Haltermann goes to the panini station for the cheese specifically. “I just like the mozzarella at the panini station,” she said. “That’s what I eat.”
The salad bar was freshened up and the homestyle station is now using fresh vegetables without oil and butter. “We call them naked vegetables,” Furhman said. “Students told us they wanted less oil [and] less fat,” he explained.
The French fries are also now hand-cut from potatoes instead of frozen French fries, which was a change implemented last semester.
There are also many gluten-free options that were added. The dessert table was updated, and finally, the cereal station expanded greatly from the selection available last semester.
“The cereal is the best thing they came up with,” freshman Marisa Bubb said. There is now an entire section on one side of the FCC with multiple cereal options and a milk station.
“I don’t like that the milk is so far away because it’s a little bit more inconvenient,” Adams said. “They never seem to stock the glasses; there are never bowls or glasses over there,” he said.
While students seem to like the many changes to the dining hall, some feel as if campus dining could still do more.
“It’s for the better, but it’s still FFC,” Haltermann said. “I don’t know if they improved the food quality at all, but they just spread out how much of the food there is,” she noted.
Adams feels that there should be more options of fruit available. “The selection of fruit has been pretty pathetic,” he said.
The fruit offered, however, among with other items on the menu, depends on the season, as JHU Dining likes to buy food locally. “We are committed to seasonality so when you get to parts of the menu like the fresh vegetables, those we kind of leave blank based on what’s fresh at market, what’s freshest at the season and then, if at all possible for the spring and summer, local because anything that’s grown locally gets absolutely, positively first preference to be served, “ Furhman said.
“Second, if we can’t get it local, then we look to seasonality. Is it generally in season? For instance, you’re not going to see a lot of citrus here in the beginning of the summer.
You’re going to see a lot of tomatoes and basil in the middle of the summer here, but you won’t see a lot of citrus. You’re not going to see fresh berries here in the dead of winter right now because, the truth is, fresh berries are being grown in Florida and the central valley of CA, but we would rather use apples that are locally grown.
We do supplement stuff that we just can’t get locally like orange and bananas, for instance, that just can’t be grown here,” Fuhrman explained.
There is still no hot chocolate or cappuccino machine, but dining is working on getting one installed as soon as possible.
“We need to be continually challenged to provide better, faster, more convenient, greater value and we really work hard to do that,” Furhman said.
