Yale University: Week One

Hello Everyone!

My name is Brittany Wrasman and I am a senior nutrition major at Miami University in Oxford, OH. Northwest Ohio is where I call home and I made the exciting 600+ mile road trip to New Haven, CT to  become a Yale University NACUFS intern from June 9 to August 2.

My name is Nicole Schutte and I am a senior nutrition major at Clemson University in Clemson, SC. I grew up with my family in the central part of Maine so I'm happy to be a little bit closer to home this summer!

Here's what we have been introduced to in week one...

Yale Dining Services is currently undergoing the transition to a new software system called Eatec, which is their ordering and inventory system for their dining and catering facilities. A unique feature about Yale University is that it is divided into 12 colleges, each of which houses or shares a dining hall. Four of the twelve colleges share dining halls, resulting in a total of 10 residential college dining halls, all of which serve the same menu each day. Although Yale does offer a couple convenient dining options, they pride themselves in developing a sense of community through the colleges they have established and encourage their students to take the time to sit down to eat and socialize. 

Currently, Yale Dining does not have a centralized processing and receiving center, which means that all dining hall orders are delivered to each individual dining facility and each dining hall manager is responsible for ordering their needed supplies. The goal of the new software system is to monitor the ordering of each dining hall in order to help contribute to a more sustainable operation. Yale Dining is also utilizing Eatec to comprise nutritional information for all the recipes they use throughout the dining halls in order to provide students with nutrition facts and identify specific ingredients of concern such as dairy, wheat, soy, etc. 

Our job in week one was to get acquainted with Eatec and begin inserting the nutritional aspect of the recipes into the system. Stationed in the main office, Nicole and I split up the list of over 1700 food items and looked up their nutritional facts through either the US Foods or USDA website. On Eatec, we type in the ingredients for the specific item, select any allergens, and fill in the nutritional information. It is a very long and tedious process, but in the end it will be rewarding to have the information available to display in the dining facilities. 

Overall...
Week one went bye very quickly. Nicole and I were introduced to all the staff in the main office and we are slowly getting the opportunity to meet the managers and workers throughout campus. To keep ourselves active after work, we joined Yale's fitness center and we ended the week by exploring New Haven and spent a day at the beach. We hope to explore the many unique dining options New Haven has to offer throughout our 8 weeks here as well as utilize the metro to do some traveling.

Stay tuned for more pictures!!!!!