Food Vendor’s Availability on Campus

By Veronica Vila | Published on March 25, 2024

Resident students at Kean University agree that there’s a lack of food vendors and food options available on campus. Michael Caramanica, Resident District Manager for Gourmet Dining at Kean, expands on the process of selecting food vendors and food options on campus.

Caramanica explained that Gourmet Dining’s hands are partially tied when it comes to food vendors’ partnerships, as those are mainly selected by a big Kean committee that includes the school’s President and contract liaison representatives, while Gourmet Dining is just a third-party company that brings to life the school’s goals and plans.

He says that right now, Kean’s and Gourmet Dining’s “main focus is sustainability,” but they are constantly collaborating with different entities within the school to “analyze trends and patterns of food consumption on campus. For this, we put out surveys for students to give us feedback on their interests, but the trends keep changing every year.”

Caramanica  assures that based on the feedback given by students, they “always try to accommodate the majority because it is really hard to please everyone.” 

He also invites students to send their feedback for gourmet Dining to evaluate via text message at 201-379-0507 or by sending them a direct message through their Instagram account, @gourmentdiningkean.

Michael Diaz, a senior Architectural Studies resident at Kean University, says that “adding new and fresh options to the menus and providing a great variety of foods is as necessary as longer working hours during weekdays and weekends.” He continues by saying, “Vendors like Ghost Kitchen are great for us to have a wider variety of food, but the frequency [of those] pop-ups needs to be increased.”

Caramanica emphasizes the difficulty of bringing more big franchises like Starbucks or independent vendors like Unity Cafè to campus due to the high cost of those contracts compared to the revenue they get. For that, Gourmet Dining is looking to increase the frequency of pop-up restaurants with a more flexible menu, as well as reopen the old Starbucks stand at the Center for Academic Success on the third floor with an in-house restaurant by the Fall 2024 semester.

Caramanica also confirmed that Kean had made no plans for the now-dead space where Unity Cafè was located on Cougar Hall’s first floor, and this space could be saved for something other than food. 

However, he says that “as we are recuperating from the COVID-19 statistics, we are really just trying to engage students as much as possible and get their feedback to improve our services further.”

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