There are few things that Brandeis students love more than a good old fashioned peer-to-peer competition. Our recent Jeopardy run, for one. The existence of our debate team, ironically named BADASS, for another. Our latest, most popular peer-to-peer competition? The dining presentations. It is not often that we have the chance to influence the outcome of these competitions, especially one as important to our daily lives as the dining contract that is up for grabs. But let me be clear: the administration has the unequivocal authority over who wins the next dining contract. They are under no formal obligation to listen to the wishes of the student body, although they would be very wise to do so.
No time to waste—let’s get right into it, and why I think Nexdine is the candidate for Brandeis, moving forward.
The dining presentations that went on during this week differ one critical (and unethical) way from the likes of Jeopardy or debate: the budgets. It was abundantly clear to me and anyone else who attended any one of these dining presentations that each of the companies involved spent thousands to even tens of thousands of dollars on their presentations. Given that, I took it upon myself to reach out to friends and friends of friends at schools where each of these companies serve their food. What I found was almost always in stark contrast to the presentations that each gave, and in my opinion, representative of what the real dining experience would be like at Brandeis under any one of these companies.
Here are the four people I got ahold of:
Matt, a freshman majoring in business and varsity golfer at Elon University and consumer of Harvest Table food.
Kylie, a freshman majoring in history and bioethics at Johns Hopkins University and consumer of Bon Appetit food.
Carly, a freshman at Kenyon college majoring in creative writing and English literature, published poet and consumer of AVI food.
Jonah, a freshman at Yale University majoring in mechanical engineering and consumer of Yale’s self dining model.
Let’s get the worst out of the way first. As it turns out, we can do FAR worse than Sodexo.
Bon Appetit at Johns Hopkins, as described by Kylie (and verified by me, once I saw the TikTok she had made with a slide show of some of her dining hall meals) is “entirely inedible” and “does terrible things to your stomach.” The food is so bad that the students at Johns Hopkins have successfully petitioned the university to terminate its contract with Bon Appetit early and switch to a self-dining model next year. She said nutrition, variety and quality were all consistently horrendous—but her largest complaint was the amount of money she and her friends spend buying food from outside the dining hall. She explained her reasoning rather wearily to me, “I’ve spent a significant amount of money just trying to get proper nutrition at all, especially since we don’t have a grocery store easily accessible. At this point, we’re just trying not to become malnourished.” She also made a point in telling me that the Kosher options from Bon Appetit are “disappointing and very limited” at Johns Hopkins. However, she remains optimistic for Johns Hopkins adopting a self dining model next year. Based on this bleak report, you don’t need me to tell you that Bon Appetit is out. If they end up serving us, your intestines will likely tell you all you need to know.
Carly didn’t have too long to talk to me—she was in the middle of midterms when I contacted her—but of AVI food, she had this to say to me: “I prefer not to think about the food while I’m wolfing it down. If I’m not with friends, I’ve taken to watching Netflix or reading to distract myself from it.” Interestingly, and for reasons my friend and fellow Brandesian Max Kappler ’25 explained in his sister article to this one (also in The Hoot), AVI was dropped by Wellesely last year (in favor of a self dining model) in a similar fashion to how Johns Hopkins is dropping Bon Appetit—and there is a component of their argument that has to do with inferior food quality. For these reasons, AVI Foodsystems is also out.
When I first asked Matt how he felt about Harvest Table food, he grimaced and had a hard time finding anything kind to say about it. “As an athlete, I have to be concerned about my nutrition” Matt quipped, later adding that he “wasn’t entirely happy, but not offended” with the level of nutrition offered through Harvest Table. “It’s edible” he declared after some deliberation, adding that the pizza they serve “is actually quite nice. Not New Haven good, but not [our mutual high school] bad, either.” (Matt and I both attended high school together in Connecticut. He takes his pizza seriously.) He did mention that Harvest Table has issues with chronically undercooking their chicken and overcooking their fish (sound familiar?). However, given what Max discovered in his research into Aramark Food systems, the parent company of Harvest Table, I cannot in good faith recommend Harvest Table, either.
Sodexo, shockingly (horrifically?) is one of our best options for continuing dining. My reasoning is simple: We know what the quality of the food is like. It’s a known variable and that counts for a lot. That being said, we all have our own feelings about Sodexo, so my endorsement of Sodexo only goes so far as to say: we can do considerably worse than what we have right now.
I also was able to personally try Yale’s self-dining food with my friend Jonah over break. I was given a dozen freshly steamed dumplings, a wonderful noodle salad, and some fantastic vegetables. Their dining is as diverse as it is good; I would describe it as restaurant quality. It was filling, and for the first time in my life, I found myself slowing down to savor a college dining meal. Yale is the poster child for self dining, this is true, but as far as I’m concerned, they have set the bar high. If Brandeis was giving it’s students the option for self dining, I would hands down recommend that. Unfortunately for all 3000+ of us, they’re not. This brings me to Nexdine, which I believe is the closest thing we can get to self dining.
Nexdine was the only company whose food I wasn’t able to evaluate out in the wild. (During our break, I scoped out the massive Alexion Pharmaceuticals building in New Haven, which has a Nexdine-served café. However, I couldn’t get past the security, so I gave up). That being said, their presentation was the most impressive of the lot (critically, it had far more substance in terms of food than any other brand). Personally, I really enjoyed their presentation. But, as I said earlier, the real reason it’s in this spot is because I see Nexdine as the next best thing to self-dining.
Some quick facts: They’re the only company in this entire lineup that is a smaller institution (in terms of valuation and assets) than Brandeis. Additionally, the only other higher education institution they serve is a café at UMass medical school (unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get out to Sherman center and South Street to try it), and it has gotten consistently good reviews. Nexdine is also new: they were founded in 2009. Nexdine is local: they’re based in Mansfield, Massachusetts, which is not far from Brandeis. All this is to say, whereas we might well be stuck with whatever bad situation we find ourselves in with Bon Appetit, Harvest Table, AVI or Sodexo, both Brandeis itself and the student body will have a proportionally outsized impact on the direction Nexdine dining service takes at Brandeis, similar to how a self dining system works. In other words, if we have an issue with NexDine’s services, we can bring it up with them, and I believe there would be a pretty good chance we could work out a fix through negotiation and simply maintaining communication. Rather than a static relationship with a 10+ billion dollar corporation committed to serving us food that may very well be shortening my life expectancy (looking at Bon Appetit, AVI, Harvest Table and Sodexo here), we have a chance to engage in a more symbiotic relationship with Nexdine. The ability to work with them actively to ensure the students of Brandeis get proper nutrition from their meal plans and to work through grievances we may have with the food served is unique, and from my perspective, arguably the most important component of the entire food service selection process. (As I stated earlier, their food is reasonably good). I emphatically endorse Nexdine serving Brandeis Students food—both for the reasons I outlined here as well as the conclusions from Max Kappler’s brilliant investigative journalism—and, should they be awarded the contract, I am hopeful that we will have a much more positive relationship with the food we eat and the people who serve it here at Brandeis moving forward.
