Six months of petitioning, research and testing has led to the recent implementation of a meal exchange program at the Fine Arts Café.
Students with a meal plan will be able to use a swipe to order a combination of a sandwich or wrap, side and small drink.
The offering of a meal exchange program at the Fine Arts Café was due to a combined effort of Student Council and the Architecture Student Council. The two groups started working for a meal exchange option at the café independently before discovering they each had the same goal.
In November, second-year Architecture student and Architecture Council treasurer Josh Gritz and second-year Architecture student Kimberly O’Keeffe started a Change.org petition to create a meal exchange program at the Fine Arts Café.
The petition garnered over 600 signatures with the first three days, Gritz said.
The petition noted that the Arts Grounds houses the School of Architecture, Drama Department, Band Building, Studio Art and Art History Departments, but the only nearby on-Grounds dining option for students is the Fine Arts Café, which did not have a meal exchange program at the time.
Because meal plans for upperclassmen often include plus dollars, students with busy schedules at Arts Grounds were spending a lot of their plus dollars on food at the café, the petition said.
“It is a burden to have to worry about using so many plus dollars at a single establishment for the sole reason of having no viable alternative,” the petition read. “Eating at the Fine Arts Café even three times a week can cost upwards of $30.”
The petition compared the situation to McLeod Café at the Nursing School, which offers a meal exchange program.
“Everyone had complained about it, but no one had tried to do anything about it, and that’s why the petition was so exciting,” Gritz said.
Together, Gritz and O’Keefe reached out to Daria Winsky, a fourth-year Batten student, who was serving as Student Council’s vice president for administration at the time.
Winksy said she had already been meeting with U.Va. Dining, as Student Council had decided they would like to see a meal exchange offered at the Fine Arts Café without knowing that Architecture school students were simultaneously working to make a change as well.
U.Va. Dining was wary at first and did not think the idea would be feasible because of the capacity of the space, Winksy said.
“They don’t have a huge kitchen area, and they were afraid that the huge influx of students would be too much for it to handle,” Winsky said. “They were a little bit resistant at first but definitely recognized the need and were doing everything they could to accommodate students more.”
First-year Architecture student Kim Corral said Aramark had additional concerns about the likelihood of upperclassmen buying meal plans.
“When we contacted Aramark, they wanted to know how many upperclassmen were going to continue buying meal plans because of this new exchange, so that was an important decision making factor with Aramark,” Corral said.
Aramark agreed to test popularity of the meal swipe with “pop up meal exchanges” that happened once in the fall and once in the spring. Pop up meal exchanges are temporary meal exchange offerings at select locations.
The fall pop up at the Fine Arts Café, however, was scheduled during finals and the timing upset some students, Winksy said.
“I iterated that back to [U.Va.] Dining … but unfortunately because the time at the end of the semester was running out they were like it’s either that or we can’t have it,” Winsky said. “Obviously it was very successful and they found a way to handle the influx of capacity and whatnot.”
U.Va. Dining Marketing Manager Nicole Jackson said the process for creating the meal exchange included focus groups and gathering data.
“At the beginning of the fall semester 2015, the U.Va. Dining team began its research into implementing a meal exchange at Fine Arts Café. We gathered input from focus groups and reviewed data provided to us by Student Council,” Jackson said in an email statement. “After that, we tried it out operationally — once in the fall and once in early spring — to determine menu options and feasibility.”
Jackson said the Fine Arts Café is the only dining location where pop-up meal changes were conducted that U.Va. Dining can add to its “meal exchange portfolio.”
“We made the necessary operational changes to the café to enable this to happen in a safe manner, and then were able to launch the program,” Jackson said.
First-year Architecture student Kassie Landvay said she goes to the Fine Arts Café every single day and thinks the meal exchange is a great decision.
“I think that it is a great decision that was a long time needed because over here at A-school,” Landvay said. “We’re pretty secluded from everything else, and with the Fine Arts Café being our only source of food many times, meal exchange in the building is very helpful.”
Gritz also said he is happy with the decision to implement the meal exchange.
“We’re very excited that after all these months and a few pop ups that they finally decided to implement it full time. I think the meal exchange options that they gave us are very good,” Gritz said.
The meal exchange hours are 11 a.m. through 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and 11 a.m. through 3 p.m. on Friday.
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