Brigham Young University Hawaii

In Fall 2010, Porter Khouw Consulting was retained by Brigham Young University Hawaii to create a five year campus-wide dining services master plan to accompany the University’s larger master planning efforts regarding growing enrollment to 5,000 students and many planned programmatic and physical changes to the campus including new classroom buildings and residential halls and a rule that would require more students to live on campus.

The scope of work included on-campus qualitative market research such as focus groups with students as well as personal interviews with administrators. Using the background data provided and the results of our on-site research, our team created a customized web-based survey which was distributed to all campus community members in order for our team to gather more insight into these customers’ eating habits and preferences. After analyzing all of the data, we presented our findings and preliminary recommendations to University administrators.

We recommended that BYU Hawaii consider offering anytime dining (unlimited access with unlimited seconds) in a new marche-style venue in order to provide students with a more flexible and customer friendly campus dining option, for all students including married couples with children who live on campus. (The University was planning to build a new dining hall to replace a dated facility.) We also recommended other changes to enhance customer service including extended hours of operation and a wider menu variety. Our team also made recommendations regarding the on-campus retail operation and catering services.

To illustrate the financial impact of our recommendations, we completed a five-year financial model complete with financial projections, staffing matrices and more. Our team also completed a preliminary demand projection to determine how large the new dining venue would need to be to provide service to the growing population and how the University could incorporate the retail operation and a large ballroom into one building to maximize efficiency and space.

PKC is also the lead foodservice consultant for the design of the University’s new dining hall.