TRANSCRIPT

Adam Hildebrandt: College is a time to spread your wings and try new things, and that includes new foods. Fortunately, University dining services has something for everyone.

Amanda Hamlett, Marketing Coordinator, University Dining Services: So, we have roughly 30 dining concepts on campus, that includes the four convenience stores. If you want to count the different concepts throughout Bite, you could probably say closer to 35 or more.

Adam Hildebrandt: Those 30 plus concepts are housed in nine different locations across campus. While each has a variety of options, University dining also emphasizes options for those who want to eat healthy or have food allergies.

Amanda Hamlett: This also allows us to specialize different menus to be allergen friendly. Like, we have a concept over at North dining called The Natural that focuses solely on being allergen friendly, so that students who, you know, that's a very important aspect of their life, know that they have a safe space that they can eat. Which also, in all of our grab and go containers across campus, if it's marked with a purple label, it is created there and is an allergen friendly item.

Adam Hildebrandt: Of course, the newest addition to this restaurant armada is the brand new Central Marketplace, which was created strategically from the concepts inside to the location of the building.

Vedda Hsu, Director, University Dining Services: This building is a central part of campus, opposite side from the Student Union. It's more of the residential area, so students will stay, spend a lot of time at the Union side during the daytime, but once they finish the class, they're coming back to their living space. This brand new building, we have four different operations going on here. On the side is Bite, our food locker concept, ghost kitchen concept.

Amanda Hamlett: It's a way for us to have like 10 dining concepts in one space. We have a place where you can make wraps all day long, salads all day long, and so you order it on GrubHub, whether on your phone, on the app, or we have kiosks that you can use. And then it'll send you a QR code, you walk up to the thing, you scan the QR code, your locker pops open and there's your food.

Adam Hildebrandt: University dining includes more than just restaurants. There are four market areas across campus, including the brand new 1890 Market.

Amanda Hamlett: It was really important to have a place, a lot of students and freshmen living on campus might not have cars or have access to leave campus to go to the grocery store. So, you know, providing a space that has everything that they could easily walk to and use their meal plan to get, you know, your basic groceries, and also non-grocery items that they can also use their meal plan on, like, you know, toilet paper, laundry detergent, even some, you know, school supplies and stuff.

Adam Hildebrandt: Students can buy those household items using their meal plan, which is just as intentional and flexible as the dining concepts themselves.

Vedda Hsu: A student just wants a piece of fruit, that will deduct how much the fruit cost. If a student wants a full meal that would cost $10, then they deduct $10 from there. And we also have a 100% rollover from Fall to Spring semester. So I feel our meal plan is really flexible and also helps students gain their financial literacy because they know, they need to know how to budget their meal dollars.

Adam Hildebrandt: With such a large range of options, it can be hard to keep up with everything going on at University Dining Services. Fortunately, there's an app for that.

Amanda Hamlett: Launching this year, we now have a University Dining Services app for students to get. And so this is a good way for students to see what's open, the concept hours, full menus, where it's at, there's maps of every, like, where everything's located. The app is called OKState Dining, and they can find it on Apple and Android and the app stores.