Unthank Hall Dining has all different types of food, including a market with both premade meals and ingredients if you want to cook for yourself. (Molly McPherson/Emerald)
Dining halls at the University of Oregon receive their food and goods from several different companies and distributors across the state. These companies range from local distributors to ones operating out of Portland.
Tom Driscoll, director of dining services at UO, highlighted the process it takes for distributors to deliver items and the advantages their services can provide.
“I think the benefit is that we have a lot of different companies we could draw from,” Driscoll said. “We’re able to use a lot of local ingredients, and sometimes you can buy those products through just one distributor. [Having multiple distributors] also helped us in ice storms in that while some couldn’t get here, others could.”
UO receives its food items from distributors that include Pacific Coast Fruit Company from which they source produce, Umpqua Dairy, The Bread Stop Bakery, Surata Soyfoods for tofu and Childers Meat Company, among others. According to Driscoll, UO receives about 20 trucks a day delivering various items from the produce company alone.
Central Kitchen on campus prepares dishes, some of which like dressing and pizza dough are made from scratch, and deliver pre-made packaged salads or sandwiches to various locations on campus. Dining services use four trucks to deliver these items around four times a day.
Andre Barrera, a part-time student worker at DUX Bistro, appreciates the constant rounds that trucks and services make around campus in an effort to deliver fresh items to dining halls.
“It’s good because we don’t really ever have a shortage of food in there, so we always have products to be using to further provide for the students,” Barrera said. “I think that’s very good for the school and the nutrition of our students because that’s our future generation right there.”
In the event of a food shortage, the first move for a dining hall would be to borrow items from another location on campus. If additional food is unavailable there, the dining hall will typically begin calling different suppliers to see if somebody else could bring them certain products.
According to Driscoll, food shortages can be pretty rare, but he acknowledged that they may occasionally be shorted a delivery or run out of one thing. Generally dining halls estimate how much of a particular food item they would need that day.
However, some students were quick to pick up on slight deficiencies and noticed some food items unavailable at certain locations from time to time.
“It’s definitely annoying especially if you go to a specific dining hall and you walk a certain amount to try and get there,” UO student James Miller said. “It can definitely be frustrating to arrive there only to find the food that you wanted isn’t available.”
While there are occasionally food shortages in dining halls, companies working with UO generally distribute items at a consistent daily rate.
“They’re [distributors] our customers, just like students are our customers,” Driscoll said. “They’re here to keep us happy, and so they do everything they can to get here on time.”
