PKC has been fortunate over the last 10+ years to have completed multiple projects for St. Lawrence University. These projects have included designing the foodservice spaces in the University’s student center and with programming and designing Dana Dining Hall. Most recently, we assisted the University with a comprehensive meal plan study and with reviewing the option of relocating catering production into another dining venue on campus. For each project, our team spent time on the SLU campus speaking with key stakeholders and learning as much as we could about the challenges and opportunities as it relates to dining on campus. For the meal plan study, our team spent two days on campus touring the current dining venues and interviewing a wide variety of stakeholders including students (from all classes, freshmen through senior), student government representatives, dining managers as well as administrators from all aspects of student life and campus administration including those from the areas of admissions, residential life, finance and facilities.
Our scope of work for this project included designing a web-based survey that was based on information gathered during our qualitative market research. The survey was distributed to the entire campus community and allowed us to gather input from a wider variety of students, faculty and staff. Using our qualitative and quantitative market research, our team developed recommendations for St. Lawrence including friendly, flexible meal plans, extended hours of operation and other innovative ideas to further enhance the campus dining program. Our team also created financial projections that illustrated the impact of our recommendations and we provided hand-drawn schematics to illustrate optimum changes to the dining venues in order to maximize customer throughput.
