After years of red ink and customer dissatisfaction, Penn Dining Services has done away with food service provider Bon Appetit, replacing it with Philadelphia's Aramark.
The move could not come at a better time, as an ailing Dining Services tries to shed its money-losing ways and rebuild a customer base. Aramark has an opportunity to remake the dining hall experience at Penn.
Along with changes in the structure of available dining plans, officials also unveiled a new series of improvements. These included an "Asian concept" and "exhibition cooking pod" in Class of 1920 Commons, and occasional celebrity chefs in Kings Court/English College House.
Nice as these features may be, innovative and creative as they are, none address the primary problems of dining with Bon Appetit: poor food and poorer service.
If Aramark wants to make Dining profitable again and bring back some of the 1,500 customers lost thanks to the bumbling, inefficiency and unreasonable expectations of its predecessor, it will need to make a dining plan worth the high cost, and the only way to do that is to make the food edible.
Aramark will fail in the same places Bon Apetit failed if it focuses on kitschy gimmicks to appease its customers rather than providing a product worth paying for. It must instead spend its resources on what actually matters -- the food students eat day in and day out.
The continued viability of the all-you-care-to-eat model on this campus is in question, to say the least. Greater changes to Dining will be needed in the future, changes that Aramark will not necessarily control.
But until such time, the best advice Aramark can get is to focus on the basics.
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