Sodexo, Creative Dining, Monopoly, and Duopoly: Food at K

Food service is changing rapidly at Kalamazoo College. Sodexo, our current food provider, had its contract come up for renewal this year, and to many students' surprise, they were rejected in favor of Creative Dining. Next year, Creative Dining will take over the cafeteria as well as the sandwich cafe and all catering services in our student center. There's been a lot of grumbling about Sodexo during my time here at K, and most students seem glad to see it go.

As if this weren't enough, we learned on Friday that Biggby, the coffee shop in our library, will be replaced by a coffee shop provided through Creative Dining. I was surprised to learn that many students are upset over Biggby's demise. Biggby is a chain coffee shop whereas Creative Dining has promised to get some sort of local thing going with our coffee. Plus Biggby's ice machine has been broken for the past week or so during one of the hottest weeks of the academic year at K. I guess they must have built up some brand loyalty. 

Food service is a contentious issue at K, I think, because there are so many competing interests that want different things out of our cafeteria. I don't think it's a stretch to assume that K has a disproportionate number of vegetarians and vegans in our student body, most of whom are unsatisfied with the options available to them. In addition, K has many students who are especially concerned over whether our food is organic and local, and about how the workers who harvest it are treated. You have some students who come from wealthier backgrounds and wouldn't mind paying extra for premium food, but others who are taking out heavy loans as it is and want to save on food. To get a wide variety of vegetarian and vegan options, you have to search outside of Michigan and work through Monsanto and other big agricultural producers. Obviously, the budget students and the premium students can't both get what they want. Plus, buying local and organic instead of where the best deal is raises costs. These tensions are exacerbated by the fact that K only has one cafeteria and a small student body, making it hard to get variety and take advantage of efficiencies of scale that can bring down price. The result is that it's impossible to get a food service that will satisfy everyone. 

Will Creative Dining be an improvement? I don't know, but I think that question misses the far more important issue, which is the structural reason for K's unsatisfying food service. The fact is, there is no competition that drives down prices, drives up quality, or makes our food service provider more responsive to student demands. Sodexo and Biggby enjoyed a nice duopoly when it came to food and drink provision on campus. Anyone who wanted catering had to go through Sodexo, and every student who lived on campus was required to spend thousands of dollars, at a minimum, to purchase meal swipes to the cafeteria. On top of this, every student with a meal plan is required to buy at least some "munch money", which is essentially where you pay extra money and then can only spend it at Stacks, Papa Johns, or Biggby. So, every student is basically forced to buy food service gift cards that can only be spent through Sodexo or Biggby (or Papa Johns, which also screws over munch money users, but that's a topic for a later post). 

So if I could redesign K's food system with a magic wand, what would I do? 

1) Increase our student size until we can get a second cafeteria run by a different food provider, or at least expand our current cafeteria to contain more options 

2) Make it so that Stacks is run by a separate company and so that anyone can cater in Hicks

3) Keep our coffee shop in the library independent 

4) Eliminate munch money 

On #1, we are slowly increasing the size of the student body, so maybe there will be some progress on that front. The fact that Biggby is going to become a Creative Dining affiliate is bad news on the #3 front. As I learned in Intermediate Microeconomics and Industrial Organization and Public Policy, a duopoly is usually much better for consumers than a monopoly, and that's exactly what Creative Dining will have. I can only hope that Creative Dining will have different munch money policies or maybe let someone else run Stacks, but that seems very pie-in-the-sky for now. 

I won't deal with any of these changes to the K food system until my senior year, at which point I'll be living and cooking off campus. However, I'll still probably stop by Stacks for lunch and get coffee from the cafe every once in awhile. It'll be interesting to see how the changes shake out.