Our firm has completed many planning and design projects for Concordia College. These projects included strategic planning, comparison studies, the design of Knutson Dining Hall including a central production kitchen where 70% of the food and meal ingredients are produced and/or served and 30% is shipped to other campus dining venues. In 2006-2007, our team assisted the College with the development of a comprehensive master plan and design program for a new student center on its campus. Our project team completed extensive market research, including on-campus focus groups and personal interviews as well as a web-based survey, in order to better understand the eating habits and preferences of Concordia’s students, faculty/staff and administrators.

 With the market research complete, our team provided recommendations for the new center including proposed dining venues and programming suggestions. The recommendations were embraced by the College and Porter was hired to design the dining venues in the new $32 million Campus Center. The Anderson Dining Room in the new Campus Center opened to rave reviews in Fall 2007. The venue is contemporary and inviting with lots of large windows that allow natural light to stream into the servery and dining room. The servery features a wide variety of stations including a grill, pizza/pasta station with a wood-burning oven, a deli station and an Explore station that was designed to offer a variety of ethnic cuisines plus a large soup and salad bar. The focus is on made-to-order display cooking. Concordia also hired our team to conduct additional market research to inform the upcoming renovation of the Down Under retail dining venue.