Yale University: Week Three

Sustainability, Optimization, and Leadership

 

As you can see by the picture on the left, Nicole and I were back to work on Eatec this week, trying to narrow down our focus of work. We decided to tackle the bakery items, Yale's bake shop goods, and the fresh produce items, because we the nutrition facts for these items would be the easiest to come by and verify. Any food items that fell under these categories we looked up their nutrition facts and ingredients through the manufacturer websites to verify that the information was correct and preceded to enter it into Eatec. As nutrition students, we are striving to enter the most valid information available, in order to ensure the nutrition information, ingredients, and allergens are correct and trustworthy when they get printed onto ingredient cards and displayed in the dining facilities. 

To go along with the ingredient cards, we are developing "ingredient identifier" icons to be displayed on the cards to point out to dining hall customers what they key ingredients are in each recipe that they may need to be aware of. For example, if a menu item has dairy, wheat, and eggs in it, on the ingredient card a picture icon of a jug of milk, a wheat grain, and an egg would be displayed, making it easy for a concerned customer to determine if there is a specific ingredient they need to avoid. Within the upcoming weeks we are going to be meeting with the director of branding and marketing to help us further develop our ideas. 

This week brought up the opportunity to meet with a key person in Yale Dining, the executive director, Rafi Taherian. Rafi spoke with us for close to two hours on how Yale strives to achieve "Excellence in Hospitality." He stated that Yale Dining is in a position of leadership in university foodservice and that it is their responsibility to find solutions to problems that arise. Rafi said that Yale Dining has a responsibility to the university, the region, and the foodservice industry, and to fulfill this responsibility, Yale Dining has the initiatives of sustainability and optimization. One of the many ways Yale Dining strives to be sustainable is through their purchasing process. They purchase MSC certified seafood, cage free eggs, local milk and dairy products, hormone free meat from animals that were humanely treated, and purchase seasonal fresh produce items. They purchase items regionally when possible, but their goal is to make sustainable food available and affordable to all, and they would not be working towards this goal if they bought up all the local products, not making them available to the local and regional population. A way Yale makes these items available to the community is through their weekly Uncommon Market. The Uncommon Market is Yale's twist on the typical farmer's market. What makes it uncommon is that Yale purchases all the produce and products being sold from the local and regional vendors and then sets it up for people in the community to purchase for nearly the same price as what Yale purchased it. The markets offers a wide variety of fresh produce, homemade breads from a bakery in New Have, ciders and lemonades, and fresh baked goods from Yale’s bakery. The market is only open for a few hours every Friday and there are usually about 300 people who attend. From what Nicole and I gathered from working there this week is that the customers love the affordable prices of the fresh produce and having the market conveniently located in the heart of Yale's campus.

On top of meeting with the executive director this week, we had the opportunity to sit down and speak with Lisa Kimmel, a registered dietitian and Yale's employee wellness director. We got her feedback on the allergen information we are working on, as well as listed her input on changes that could be made within the dining halls. Before working in this position, Lisa counseled students and gathered a lot of valuable feedback from them and their concerns with dining on campus. She suggested the idea of serving smaller portions as well as having smaller bowls and plates available. She also wants to push to get a RD available to meet with students about dining options and help cater to students with specific dietary needs. We plan on setting another meeting up with Lisa to shadow her and get a more detailed description of what her current job entails. 

Summary.....

This week we got to meet with several valuable people, including the executive director of Yale Dining, Rafi Taherian, the employee wellness director and registered dietitian, Lisa Kimmel, and the manager of Calhoun Dining Hall, Jeff Hughes. We learned more about what Yale Dining is doing to be sustainable and made more progress on our Eatec data entry. 

We ended the week by taking the official Yale University tour, where we captured just a few of the beautiful sites Yale has to offer. We spent the weekend in New Haven, going to the local theater and watching "The Heat" and checked out another local restaurant, Kitchen Zinc, where we ordered some delicious pizza, in which the ingredients all came from local sources.