Penn Dining to revamp meal plans

Thanks to student feedback, dining plans will be streamlined in the coming year.

Penn will eliminate three of its 10 plans for the coming year, director of Business Services Doug Berger said. The meal plans will be renamed with acronyms to better reflect what students will receive.

Pam Lampitt, general manager of Conference Services, explained the plans will be designed to fit in better with students’ lifestyles. These plans, similar to the existing ones, will each have varying totals of Dining Dollars and meal swipes to suit students’ needs.

Paul Bulau, district manager of Bon Appetit Management Company, said the plans will be “more focused to the type of students” buying them.

New names of meal plans will include the “Food in Time” plan — or FIT for short — which averages to about one meal per week with 700 Dining Dollars for students who often eat on the go.

Campus Express will provide a more detailed description online, which may aid incoming freshmen in their decision.

“Until you get here, you don’t really know what to expect” from dining plans, Business Services spokeswoman Barbara Lea-Kruger, said.

For Engineering and Wharton freshman Tim Lynch, better and clearer options for dining plans will be helpful. “It’s kind of a waste of money because I end up with meals that I don’t eat,” he said. “Even the one with the fewest meals and Dining Dollars was still too much for me.”

Penn’s new system is designed to help students cut unnecessary costs. “Our goal is to not have any leftover meals on students’ plans,” Bulau said. Over the last few years, unused meals and Dining Dollars have decreased, he added.

Ariel Rosenbaum, a College junior, said she is glad to have a meal plan so that she can eat and socialize at Hillel, as well as for when she feels “too lazy to cook.”

While plans are being streamlined, Rosenbaum said she hopes Penn will tackle the issue of hours of operation for its dining facilities. “College kids eat a lot later than normal people,” she said, in hopes that dining hours will be extended next year.

Lampitt said the University is trying to assess late-night dining options and regular meals hours, while taking into consideration union workers’ hours and the cost of operation for Penn.

College freshman Shaun Libou, who has an unlimited meal plan, said he did not know much about the various meal plans before he signed up for his. “There’s no good balance between dining dollars and meals,” he said.

Libou added he ran out of Dining Dollars within the first two weeks of the semester because retail dining is more convenient. “You’re better off just buying food as you go,” he said.

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