Dining's efforts to reduce waste go beyond the clean plate club

With 20 service locations on campus, preventing and managing food waste always is a goal for ISU Dining. By getting the most out of purchased ingredients, menu planning, composting and partnerships with campus and Ames community groups, the dining team maximizes its resources while helping others.

"A good dining program operates with the idea of waste reduction wherever it's possible," said director of dining Karen Rodekamp. "It starts with writing a good recipe, not over-ordering and really working to reduce waste from the very beginning."

When a plan comes together

Dining's plan to reduce waste has three components: forecasting, batch cooking and menu engineering.

ISU Dining staff writes its menus by semester -- spring is written the previous fall and fall the previous spring -- before the menu management team inputs it to dining's system. Forecasting needs, trends and any updates begins four weeks prior to the day.

"Numbers can be adjusted until two weeks before, based on how much you served the last time," said associate dining director Paige Ermer. "The first four weeks of a semester are more of a guess, but after that you see the same menu items again and know if there was an issue. It allows staff to make better judgments going forward."

Dining leaders consider everything from weather and athletic home events to academic factors like midterms or finals when planning. Ermer said gauging customer interest in different items is key. Dining has years of data to review trends, but often doesn't look back more than a year because student tastes change quickly.

"The palate of the student changes. They are eating differently from what they did even last year," Rodekamp said. For example, a shift to more lean meats in diets worldwide has made pork loin more popular today than in the past.

Ermer said nearly all food items are prepared in multitudes of a portion that serves 100 for proper scaling-up of recipes and the freshest choices for diners. By not overpreparing menu items, staff can use ingredients another day.

Effective menu planning and design enables the strategic use of available ingredients across multiple applications. For example, peppers could be used the same day for pizza toppings and in omelets, soups and salad bars. 

"It also helps make best use of our storage space because if you only use an ingredient once, the likelihood of it going bad goes up," Ermer said.

Proper preparation and disposal

Another way ISU Dining avoids waste is properly cutting and slicing produce and proteins, a skill passed on during staff onboarding by managers. Properly cutting a green pepper -- or any of the hundreds of ingredients dining staff could encounter -- saves hundreds of pounds of waste each semester. The parts of the pepper not served to customers -- the stem and inedible center -- are composted at the ISU compost facility. The soil that is created is used on campus landscaping, construction projects and at ISU farms. Food waste is composted from the Union Drive, Seasons and Friley marketplaces and Hawthorn Market Café.

"Pre-consumer food waste from back of house production, and post-consumer food waste from the dish belt line is composted," said Rodekamp, who noted more than 200 tons of waste was composted in 2023.

Facilities planning and management picks up the waste from the four locations three times a week. Hawthorn also uses a consumer-sorted practice where nearly every single-use disposable item is compostable, Rodekamp said.

Substitutions as necessary 

ISU Dining, which has three days of product on hand at all times, strives to have all advertised items available when people visit. Despite the best menu planning, a spike in interest in an item can lead to it running out. In that case, a substitute is added to the menu that most closely resembles the original.

"If there is a run-out on an item, we have to substitute something," Ermer said. "If we run out of chicken tenders maybe we substitute popcorn chicken. We frequently have surplus product which allows us to reintroduce it into the menu as needed."

An effort funded through a partnership with student government, lets students, faculty and staff use their own drink containers at retail locations. In addition to saving the customer 35 cents,  it lessens the need for single-use cups. It was used 5,500 times last year.

Local partners

ISU Dining uses vegetables and fruits -- peppers and onions to cantaloupe and apples -- grown at the ISU Horticulture Research Farm in a 20-plus year partnership. Dining also purchases turkeys from ISU's Stanley L. Balloun Turkey Teaching and Research Facility south of Ames.

Food at First, an Ames food pantry, receives baked goods from dining's retail locations, and its daily community meal in downtown Ames also receives donations from ISU Dining. 

"The end of semesters is a common time we donate to Food at First if we have partial cases of food we will not be able to use or freeze," Rodekamp said. "We send products from our catering department throughout the semester." 

SHOP, the student pantry on campus, also receives items, food and otherwise. Rodekamp said one of the dining centers recently got new plates so they're donating thousands of plates to SHOP for students to use in their apartments.