Feed Your Brain (FYB), Hamline’s food advocacy group, spent a lot of time during the 2023-24 academic year fighting for a shift in the university’s dining service provider. This work included a multitude of meetings where students gathered to discuss their concerns about Aramark’s service and what they would like to see change.
To the pleasure of FYB, a Request For Proposal (RFP) committee was assembled which consisted of a variety of Hamline faculty members and two students, Oliver Engstrom and Hafsa Ahmed. The committee aimed to hear out student concerns and choose a service provider that fit as many criteria as possible.
FYB member Matthew Maroney expressed why the change to a new provider was so necessary and why this need became so evident towards the end of the school year.
“I don’t think Aramark was willing to change. They were very stuck in their ways. I think we saw them trying desperately to put on a good face for the last months of this past semester and it didn’t work,” Maroney said.
In early July, an announcement revealed that the RFP committee decided on Sodexo as the new service provider. In response to this news, FYB posted on their instagram to express that they had succeeded in removing Aramark from Hamline’s dining. FYB found that this message was misinterpreted by a few of its viewers.
“What I intended [the ‘We Won’ post] to mean was that we won our fight against Aramark. That is the missing end of that sentence. ‘We won… the fight against Aramark.’ It was taken as ‘We won… we got Sodexo.’ Which was not the intent,” Maroney said.
Due to this misinterpretation, FYB received feedback that Sodexo is not the win they were claiming it to be. In response, FYB posted an explanation of the work they had done to get Aramark out of Hamline.
“People that are just strictly looking at the [Feed Your Brain instagram] account don’t see what we did and the progress we made and what we were trying to do. So it was nice to put that out there,” another said. “There [are] going to be incoming students that don’t know what happened last year. So I think it is good to have a resource like that [to have] ‘this is what we did, this is what we are doing’.”
Maroney expressed similar feelings about the decision for Sodexo to be the new dining service provider. FYB has not hesitated to acknowledge that Sodexo has its flaws but they are also eager to simply have Aramark gone to begin a new journey.
“Despite Sodexo’s flaws, we are excited for a fresh start,” Maroney said.
“I wasn’t too upset about Sodexo, I knew obviously we weren’t going to get some perfect provider, we can’t afford that. I knew it was going to be a big provider and I am hopeful because of Saint Kate’s connection to Sodexo. I am hopeful that we can get them to be as progressive as we can within Hamline’s price range,” Fuller said.