Princeton University
OP-8: Sustainable Dining

Campus Dining has been a partner of the farmers’ market since it launched in 2007 by Greening Princeton, a student organization devoted to improving environmental sustainability, and is staffed by volunteers from the group. Members of the University and local communities are able to purchase fresh locally grown produce and other goods from area farmers and businesses that use sustainable practices. Typically, vendors provide a range of items including Jersey Fresh fruits and organic vegetables, cold pressed juices, Jersey Fresh honey, locally-made breads, nut butters, organic sandwiches and salads, gluten-free baked goods, and much more! Campus Dining partners with local purveyors to support the weekly market with cooking demonstrations and recipe tastings highlighting seasonal produce.

In the fall of 2019, the Frist Campus Center unveiled a new Carvery concept in the Food Gallery which features vegetarian and vegan options such as whole roasted cauliflower carved to order and a vegan mac and cheese that quickly became a customer favorite. Café Vivian, an outlet in the Frist Campus Center, serves acai bowls and vegan smoothies as well as offering a fully vegan salad bar, vegan soup and vegan flatbreads, sandwiches and snacks.

Campus Dining’s purchases from diverse vendors who are minority-owned, woman-owned, minority woman-owned, veteran-owned, disadvantaged businesses, and small business enterprises (SBEs) amounting to 21% of the food and beverage purchasing. In addition, Campus Dining purchases uniforms, paper goods, and event décor from diverse suppliers.

Campus Dining selects several nights during the year to explore a seasonal, locally sourced plant-focused menu. The dinners feature special chef stations and beautifully decorated displays.

Campus Dining hosts an annual culinary competition, the TIGER CHEF CHALLENGE. Teams representing each undergraduate residential college and the Graduate College compete in a culinary competition in Dillon Gym. Drawing from a fully stocked pantry that includes a secret plant-based ingredient (jackfruit in 2019), each team must prepare their best dishes for a team of judges. Teams work for weeks with mentor chefs from their college, learning and honing their skills. A food expo complements the competition, offering attendees the opportunity to sample a wide variety of mostly vegan sustainable dishes from Campus Dining vendors.

The annual Origins Dinner that introduces first year students to our dining program is focused on locally sourced low impact options. We repeat the concept for Families Weekend and Earth Day to maintain continuity of the concept with our students.

Through the Food and Agriculture Initiative (FAI) Campus Dining explores food and agriculture as a subject of critical inquiry and applied knowledge to address social and environmental challenges in the service of humanity. The initiative seeks to build an intellectual platform that allows for the emergence of collaborative projects that combine and generate new knowledge in the field while taking a global leadership position to shape the field while taking a global leadership position to shape the field of food systems. The goal is to evaluate potential pathways for a sustainable food system.

An example of innovation in ingredient swaps to create low impact menus is the Photosynthesis Pathways Dinner hosted by Campus Dining supporting research around sustainable agriculture and water use. The menu highlighted the water usage of various items and was designed to start a discussion around innovative foods many of which are traditional in arid and semiarid regions but less commonly found in New Jersey which can reduce water consumption by up to ten times when compared with traditional fare. Seeing research come to life in the form of engaging talks, tasty menu items, and the unique energy of a university dining hall during the dinner rush generates excitement around underutilized and innovative foods, and aims to accelerate the uptake of eco-friendly dining options.

Senior Class Seminars are a series of cooking classes for members of the graduating class that feature plant-forward dishes that emphasize grains and legumes in recipes as well as introducing low impact cooking methods.

Vegan options are standard in all dining facilities at every meal with some dining halls even having all vegan stations or vegan bars. There are also vegan options available for catered events. Beyond entrees, we offer non-dairy milk alternatives as well as vegan dessert options.

In 2019, we introduced the Beyond Burger in the Frist Campus Center.

Campus Dining was awarded an A on the PETA Report Card.

All menu items in Campus Dining venues are labelled where applicable as vegan and vegetarian as well as halal.

Posters supporting the Origins programs are prominently displayed in dining facilities as well as countertop signs. The posters highlight a product or culinary philosophy—EAT LOCAL or CAGE FREE EGGS—and tell the story of where our food comes from and who produces it, why it matters that it’s good for you and good for the planet, and lastly, where you can find the items or see the philosophy in action.

Napkin inserts created for Earth Month in April and Campus Sustainability Month in October but used year-round follow the theme of bite-sized meal changes are a positive step toward a more sustainable future. The topics show the higher impact on land, water, and energy when producing animal products, as compared to the lower impact for legumes and whole grains.

Campus Dining has partnered with the student organization Greening Dining and the Office of Sustainability to expand food waste awareness and collection with temporary, pop-up events across campus. At the onset of the COVID-19 changes, the group was poised to launch a week long The Clash of the Compost challenge to record food waste at all residential dining halls. The plan included different messaging to see what could drive change and reduce food waste. This challenge would support the ongoing campaign to “Keep Calm – Take What You Want, but Eat What You Take” in residential dining. The concept is supported by pop-up awareness events and audits at individual dining halls.

Campus Dining ran a pilot program for trayless dining in residential dining halls in 2009 and established the program campus wide in 2011.

Campus Dining takes a one-ounce-at-a-time approach to reducing food waste by first monitoring production at the source. Where we have an opportunity to divert edible food away from composting and landfill, we do so. Our food harvest program began in fall 2018 with Butler and First dining halls, and it now includes the Forbes, Rockefeller, and Mathey dining halls. Food is currently donated to Bentley Community Services.
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2018/01/25/saving-food-one-ounce-timesustain

Campus Dining’s food diversion program was started in 1993. Since that time, we have transitioned from diverting food solely to pig farms to piloting a program with a local vendor for compost and now have a program that diverts some food to animal feed and some to compost on the animal farm. All programs were established with local vendors in family owned businesses.

In addition, Campus Dining has partnered with the Office of Sustainability and the Campus As Lab project known as the S.C.R.A.P. Lab to divert retail outlet pre and post-consumer food and accepted compostable disposables to the project.

Since the inception of the food diversion program in 1993, kitchen scraps have been collected at each dining hall. In the past three years, Campus Dining has expanded to collect pre-consumer food scraps at large campus events that are hosted outside of dining halls.

Since the inception of the food diversion program in 1993, students and guests in the residential dining halls have been responsible for scraping their food waste and separating trash and recycling from their plates at dining hall collection spaces. In the past three years, Campus Dining has expanded to collect pre-consumer food scraps at large campus events that are hosted outside of dining halls. Campus Dining in partnership with the S.C.R.A.P. Lab, began a pilot in the fall of 2019 to encourage customers in the Frist Campus Center to sort their waste as the students would in the dining halls. In addition, we piloted post-consumer waste diversion in a satellite café to collect food scraps and compostable disposables.

Campus Dining provides reusable service ware for all residential dining halls. Prior to COVID-19 “dine in” was the only option in residential dining. Reusable service ware has been reintroduced in the Frist Campus Center retail outlet where the default option is reusable with a few exceptions being related to late night dining. Customers must request disposables. A comprehensive review of purchases of paper and disposables led to replacing some plastic containers with compostable containers and streamlining the number of products purchased.

Campus Dining Catering has created innovative options that make reusables the more attractive option. Princeton Catering offers breakfast cottage jars served in reusable Mason jars.

The University supported the installation of dishwashers and the purchase of reusable china at key high volume Campus Catering locations to decrease the use of disposables.

Campus Dining provides compostable plates, bowls, and napkins for many menu items served “to-go” in retail operations. These items are compostable on our campus at the S.C.R.A.P. Lab in-vessel composter.

Love a Mug reusable cup discount
Campus Dining has had a reusable mug discount for many years. To reinvigorate the program, Campus Dining created the #LoveAMug campaign which was named a NACUFS (National Association of College and University Services) Gold Award for Sustainability. The #LoveAMug campaign increased awareness about and participation in the re-usable mug program across campus. Anyone who brought a reusable mug to the various retail café locations received a fill-up of coffee for two dollars. At this price, coffee in a reusable mug was the best coffee deal on campus.
Individuals were encouraged to share pictures of their mugs and the stories behind them on Twitter and Instagram with the hashtag #LoveAMug. Campus Dining gave away a free cup of coffee each day to the most unique posts. All told, the campaign featured more than 65 posts with stories from nearly 40 individuals and departments across campus. The initial two-week pilot campaign prevented nearly 1,500 paper cups from going to the landfill, while also celebrating the unique backgrounds of staff and departments across campus. Thanks to the success of the pilot, #LoveAMug was re-launched as a permanent offer to coffee and tea drinkers on campus.

ORIGINS
Origins is an interactive dining experience held during undergraduate students’ first-year orientation that highlights where our food comes from and why it matters. As the first meal of the year, Origins cultivates a consciousness and ethos of sustainability in service to local and global communities and inspires a culture of gratitude for community efforts to support local farms and food purveyors, as well as for those who prepare their food. We nourish students to be their healthy best while strengthening community engagement and providing high-quality, great-tasting food prepared with healthy, sustainable ingredients by a passionate team. Through Origins, and other sustainability programs during the year, we highlight what we do every day within the context of environmental challenges to encourage thoughtful solutions.

BEAT PLASTIC POLLUTION
In summer of 2018, Campus Dining announced a plan to join in a campaign with the United Nations Environment Programme to dramatically reduce the amount of plastic used in our operations. Our year-end employee celebrations in June are completely free of single-use disposable plastic.
•Plastic water bottles have been replaced with aluminum cans from a Climate Neutral Certified and Women Owned company.
•Plastic bags have been replaced by paper bags and will only be available upon request.
•Plastic straws have been eliminated and paper straws will only be available upon request.
•Plastic utensils replaced by compostable utensils.
These are the first steps in a long-term commitment to #BeatPlasticPollution.

DAYLIGHT DINING
Established in 2011 as a way to conserve energy by turning the lights off on sunny days when supplemental lighting is not needed. Lighting scenarios were subsequently installed to provide different levels of lighting determined by the time of day.

FORAGING TOURS
Campus Dining has taken groups of students on foraging tours to companies such as locally-based Small World Coffee Roasters where students met the roasters and learned about responsible coffee bean sourcing and Severino Pasta, a family owned business, where they experienced first-hand the authentic Italian techniques for making artisanal pasta.

GARDEN STATE ON YOUR PLATE
Since 2013, Campus Dining has visited local schools throughout the year to support wellness and culinary education programs for students from pre-K to grade 5. We design programs as part of the Garden State on Your Plate program, which brings fresh produce and products from local farms into school cafeterias.

UNIVERSITY TEACHING KITCHENS
Campus Dining holds several educational cooking classes in residential colleges, in retail locations, and on social media for students, faculty, and staff. This past year classes have included chocolate bark making at our Bake Shop, which was then donated to the local food pantry, Wintersession classes, held by several residential dining halls, on how to cook various Italian dishes, and even a few classes in Cafe Vivian for staff and faculty groups.

COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS
Outside of the University, we have proudly partnered with programs such as HomeFront, a local organization focused on breaking the cycle of poverty and ending homelessness through the help of the community. Cooking lessons were held by our chefs to teach skills on how to prepare nutritious meals on a $10 budget with different lessons focusing on an affordable, sustainable, and nutrient-dense main ingredient; eggs, lentils, and a Bolognese sauce that can be created with any vegetables on hand.

Twice each year, members of the Campus Dining team travel to the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen to prepare and serve a full hot lunch for up to 300 guests. The team also assembles and delivers a meal-to-go so patrons have a meal for dinner.

As part of National Nutrition Month, Campus Dining began a relationship with the University pre-school, UNow Day Nursery, introducing a program that integrates food and cooking that are good for you and good for the planet with lessons in math, English-language arts, science, and social studies.

CAMPUS WELLNESS PARTNERSHIP PROGRAMS
From presentations to outreach to education, wellness extends beyond the dining halls. Programs such as healthy eating grocery store tours and nutrition education workshops inform students, staff, and faculty about steps they can take to make changes in their own diets that are both good for you and good for the planet.

CRAFTED BURGER
Introduced in 2017 as a replacement for our 100% beef burger, the Crafted Burger is an exclusive 60/40 blend of certified grass-fed beef and local mushrooms that supports our commitment to wellness and sustainability without sacrificing taste. The burger which is also Halal certified offers increased diversity and supports more inclusive dining. The Crafted Burger was developed by our chefs and a local purveyor who custom blends our proprietary recipe.

ACADEMIC NEXUS
Campus Dining supports academics and Culinary Labs through the Food and Agriculture Initiative (FAI) that explore global food and agriculture as a subject of critical inquiry and applied knowledge to address social and environmental challenges in service of humanity. Campus Dining provides support as an applied science partner committed to identifying solutions and best practices for future generations through academics, research, global collaborations, physical spaces, and experiential learning. Campus Dining prepares a yearly learning report from the FAI to be used as a cross-disciplinary tool for faculty.

Culinary labs associated with the coursework explore the foods and preparation methods related to the weekly lecture. They bring theory and practice to life. Professors collaborate with Campus Dining culinary, wellness, and sustainability teams to create food menus that exhibit specific themes. The object of the class is not to give students answers to how we can effectively and responsibly feed future populations, but supply them with facts that will help them create solutions

The Urban Sustainability Transitions in India and the World conference supports the objective of converting research that can translate into low impact dining programs through understanding food systems from around the world. The conference, supported by Campus Dining, addressed key interactions between India and the world that have potential to transform human and planetary well-being, and our imaginaries of the human experience.

Through the Food and Agriculture Initiative, Princeton University seeks to harmonize its operational practices with the sustainability values it teaches. In this spirit, Campus Dining supported a faculty initiative to investigate opportunities to reduce or eliminate an ingredient from the food served on campus that has proved to be especially destructive to
the environment: palm oil. Palm oil cultivation has been a major driver of
deforestation across Southeast Asia, and it is now spreading in parts of Latin
America. Where once stood tropical forests with their rich variety of species, one
now sees acres and acres of oil palm monocultures, which have been shown to
harbor very little in the way of native wildlife. Campus Dining provided
a breakdown of all food products served on campus that might contain
palm oil. With the assistance of a student volunteer, products were identified that actually contained palm oil and determined whether there were comparable
products that did not. If we can replace most or all of the palm oil-containing
products served on campus, we will have made a small but notable contribution
to reducing tropical deforestation, enlightened our students, faculty, and staff on
an important environmental issue, and served as a model for other educational
institutions interested in improving the sustainability of their food chains.

GREENING DINING
Since 2002, Campus Dining has met regularly with students and the Office of Sustainability to discuss issues around our food system and waste management. The student group hosts various food and waste related events and is a key partner in peer education.

HERITAGE MONTHS
Campus Dining partners with the Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding to host meals associated with Heritage Month events to make the connection between food and culture. The Fields Center advises and oversees the development of nationally recognized heritage month programs that celebrate the rich cultural, social and political contributions of diverse groups in our society. Heritage Months include: Latinx Heritage Month, Native American Heritage Month, Black History Month and Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.

Data was extracted from multiple reporting sources including FoodPro® menu management software, individual vendor reporting, and accounting reports. Purchasing is shown as percentages which represent categories of purchased items as a percent of total food and beverage purchases in accordance with departmental policies.