The beginning of the academic year marks the return of Parkhurst as the college’s dining provider, following a two-year stint with Aramark that left students deeply dissatisfied with the food options on campus. Parkhurst also served as the college’s dining provider prior to Aramark.
Dean for the Student Experience Ian Binnington said that compared to last year, his experience as a diner has been “night and day.” Some stations in Brooks have even achieved restaurant quality at times, he added.
“Over the past couple of weeks as students have moved in — new students and continuing students — I’ve been asking almost every student I meet what their opinion of the dining is,” Binnington said. “And I think I’ve barely come across one who doesn’t have a positive opinion.”
Among the changes Parkhurst is bringing to the college is the return of Pine Market. Located by the entrance of Brooks Dining Hall, Pine Market will transition to an area where students can buy food every day of the year around the clock.
There are also new stations in McKinley’s: Corner Mercantile serves deli-style foods and desserts, Cinco Cantina serves contemporary Mexican style food, the Grille serves American grill classics, Hello Bistro serves salads, the Oven serves pizza and Bravo serves a continuously-rotating menu.
These changes are being guided by members of Parkhurst’s leadership team, several of whom already have experience working with the college.
Parkhurst General Manager Maria Foxall is no stranger to Allegheny. From 2019 to 2022, Foxall served as the director of Brooks before Parkhurst lost its contract with Allegheny. Once Parkhurst won the bidding process in Spring 2024, Foxall said the company contacted her, asking her to come back and direct all of Parkhurt’s operations at Allegheny.
As general manager, Foxall was involved in much of the transitional hiring process and said that while the majority of the Parkhurst leadership team is new, approximately 90% of employees working under Aramark opted to stay on and shift to working for Parkhurst.
“There’s a lot of younger people and they’ve actually really enjoyed working for Parkhurst because they’re learning to actually cook from scratch,” Foxall said. “Not to say anything bad about Aramark, but a lot of it was processed food or, like, came out of a bag or box.”
Now, Foxall said, employees are hand-breading all the chicken, making marinara sauce from scratch and learning cooking skills that they can bring home to their families.
Foxall, who is from Denmark, worked as a nurse for the first 15 years of her career. Once her kids were born, she took a job as a cook at a daycare to provide her children with childcare. There, Foxall was confronted with the task of cooking meals using a menu of highly processed, non-nutritious ingredients that she believed were unhealthy for children. The experience inspired Foxall to pursue a degree in nutrition, and she began working in nursing homes’ dining service and eventually for Meals on Wheels, an organization that delivers nutritious meals to senior citizens.
“I just have a passion for food and feeding people wholesome food,” Foxall said. “I think that’s so important, and so, I also love to educate people about food.”
Part of her education efforts will include bringing students on behind-the-scenes tours to demonstrate how different food staples are made and help students begin to gain an understanding of the skills needed to perform the labor-intensive work.
Being from Denmark, Foxall also has a passion for introducing international foods to the college community. In the past, Foxall said international students could submit recipes that Parkhurst would make and have available for students to try. She wants to bring this opportunity back.
Food quality was important for Foxall in her job as a daycare cook, and it remains important to her now. She is proud that many of the staple dining hall foods — like pizza dough, marinara sauces and soups — are made from scratch on site. She said the kitchen also just got a smoker, so all of McKinley’s Cinco station pulled pork is smoked overnight.
In addition to food quality, Foxall named allergen-friendly food options as a top priority. Her team is currently in the process of sourcing halal and kosher meats so that they can be served at a special station. She is also aware that students had difficulties getting meals during Ramadan last year and said that she plans to adjust dining hours to accommodate the early morning and late evening meals.
“We want everybody to be able to eat,” Foxall said. “One thing I do (is) encourage everybody, like when I talk to students with allergies… come into the dining room and ask for a chef, and the chef will literally walk through each station and say, ‘This is what you can have, and this is safe,’ or, ‘This you should stay away from.’”
Foxall also said that students can call ahead and request a specific allergen-friendly meal, and the dining staff will do their best to accommodate that request.
Dean for Student Life Trae Yeckley works with Parkhurst nearly every day. So far, they said they have heard positive feedback from students, particularly regarding the salad bar and fresh fruit in Brooks.
“That was the thing we heard loud and clear from students, last year in particular,” Yeckley said.
Foxall has also heard positive student feedback, especially about the fresh fruit in Brooks and the general freshness and flavors of the food.
Binnington attributes this, in part, to Parkhurst’s commitment to high-quality food.
“They generally don’t serve — there are probably some exceptions to this — but they generally don’t serve food that’s been frozen first, which is not the experience of the past couple of years,” Binnington said.
The college’s expectations surrounding the quality and freshness of the food served in the dining halls do not vary significantly across different dining providers that are hired. However, even though expectations are set, some practices are out of the college’s control and are determined at a corporate level, which can lead to differences in the products offered by different dining providers, according to Binnington.
The primary way the college can control for these differences is during the bidding process, when dining providers submit applications to be reviewed by faculty and students.
During the bidding process last spring, several criteria were placed at the forefront of the discussion — including sustainability efforts.
“We love Parkhurst,” said Sustainability Coordinator Kurt Hatcher, ’07. “They’ve been wonderful to work with.”
Since Parkhurst had a relationship with the Office of Sustainability during its previous tenure, Hatcher said it has been helpful to not have to start from scratch on enacting dining sustainability measures.
During the bidding process, Hatcher and Director of Sustainability Kelly Boulton, ’02, wrote nearly six pages of sustainability-related criteria — ranging from guidelines for purchasing ethically sourced food to the usage of environmentally-friendly cleaning supplies — that dining providers applying to the college had to respond to. Parkhurst was up to the challenge, Hatcher said.
“Our experience of their openness to sustainability is that when we propose an idea, their response is typically, ‘That sounds good, but we can do more,’” Hatcher said. “It’s very exciting to work with people who get it (sustainability) and see the value in it and are open to new ideas and collaborating together. So it’s really wonderful.”
Hatcher said the sustainability efforts feel very collaborative, as evidenced by the fact that the Parkhurst team regularly meets with Hatcher and Boulton.
One sustainability effort Parkhurst leaned into is the green box program, facilitating the switch to an app-based tracking system and working to ensure that green boxes are the mandatory default for all take-out meals.
Already, the impact has been significant. As of September 10, over 435 students were registered in the green box system and over 2,082 disposable containers had been avoided, according to Hatcher. Currently, students can redeem points that accrue in the app by showing their phone to McKinley’s employees, which will earn them a free monster cookie. In the future, Hatcher hopes to expand the possible prizes.
Foxall said that she hopes to eventually take steps to further expand the positive environmental impact of the green box program, like using reusable cups. In an effort to make McKinley’s as low-waste as possible, it will also soon transition to using only reusable dishware in the sit-down area, according to Hatcher.
An additional sustainability initiative Parkhurst has signed onto is a requirement that they source nearly 25% of their food from a local vendor or a Forage Partner, according to Foxall.
“There’s just something about if you know where your food comes from — you have to know where your food comes from,” Foxall said. “So, I’m a big believer in that.”
Local vendors must go through an approval process certifying that they follow certain food safety guidelines, according to Hatcher. The Carrden — the garden located outside Carr Hall — is in the process of becoming an approved vendor, which means that harvest from the garden like herbs could be used to flavor food and make iced teas.
Foxall said that the response from local vendors when they hear about the opportunity to build a partnership with the college has been overwhelmingly positive.
“They’re so excited that we’re back,” Foxall said.
Though the college became carbon neutral in 2020, the standard guidelines the college uses to track its carbon emissions do not require the accounting of greenhouse gas emissions stemming from dining services. Hatcher said he and Boulton hope this will change in the future. Parkhurst, he said, has been immediately receptive to locating existing data and generating additional data required to calculate dining greenhouse gas emissions.
Beyond existing sustainability efforts, Hatcher said an additional expectation written into Parkhurst’s contract is that the company will continue to become more sustainable over time. This manifests in a myriad of ways, like a requirement that the percentage of locally-sourced food increases every year.
“That’s not an immediate initiative, but the fact that they’re on board with that kind of speaks to how they value sustainability,” Hatcher said. “It’s really exciting.”
Hatcher said that even though the Office of Sustainability has maintained the same sustainability expectations for dining providers over the years — and even expanded their expectations — it has not always been easy to generate buy-in.
“The experience with our prior provider was that oftentimes the folks we worked with on campus didn’t have the same background in these types of initiatives and so there was a bigger learning curve,” Hatcher said.
It was often the case that Hatcher and Boulton had to maintain a greater level of vigilance around sustainability initiatives because rules would not be followed and then would have to be reinforced.
“It’s just been nice to be working with people who have backgrounds in sustainability,” Hatcher said. “They have the answers to our questions right at their fingertips, they know what we’re asking for and where to get it, they know what our minimums and our baselines and our sustainability policies are — and that’s just taken as a minimum, not a sort of a suggestion.”
During the dining provider bidding process, food insecurity efforts were also a topic that came up. Binnington said that while there have not yet been extensive conversations this year about measures to combat food insecurity, there will be soon.
“It’s very clear that there are food insecurity issues on campus,” Binnington said. “It’s been six weeks, so I don’t have a clear picture of what that’s going to look like, but I am confident that, as they have partnered with us on all of these other issues over the last six months or so, and as we’ve gotten this stood up, I’m confident they’ll be partnering with us on these issues.”
Foxall said that she has requested the data collected during the food insecurity survey conducted last year and that she is eager to find ways to combat food insecurity on campus.
Binnington says that meal plans will likely change in the future, given the need for meal plans to evolve to meet the needs of the student population, but that there are currently no plans or discussions at this point about changing the meal plans.
During an open forum discussion Parkhurst hosted with the campus community via Zoom in March 2021, students identified high grocery costs in Pine Market, the large number of meal swipes needed to purchase a full meal during COVID-19 era pre-set proportions and lack of desirable food options as reasons for their displeasure, according to Campus reporting at the time.
In a September 2022 Campus article, former Chief of Staff Kevin Kovalycsik said that the change in dining service providers came as a result of former President Hillary Link’s response to community feedback. During his tenure, Kovalycsik also hired Wi-Fiber, an internet service provider that failed to meet the college’s expectations and was fired last year after a catastrophic failure of the college’s network system.
Foxall did not address what specifically led to the college choosing Aramark to replace Parkhurst, but said that she hopes to stymie any potential future problems through increased transparency, communication and an increased sense of partnership with the college.
“I feel as though they are truly our partners in wanting to work with us in order to deliver the best experience to the students,” Binnington said.
Binnington expressed similar positive feelings about Parkhurt’s relationship with the college.
“Parkhurst is committed to making this relationship with Allegheny work and that means a whole variety of things including point of service with students, but also back of house in terms of equipment and investment and all of those other things that students don’t see,” he said.
Both Binnington and Yeckley said they were unsure of what caused Parkhurst to lose its contract with the college, as they said neither of them were involved in managing the contracts. Kovalycsik, who was involved in hiring Aramark, no longer works for the college.
Binnington said President Ron Cole, ’87, has committed to giving students a seat at the table in dining conversations going forward, just as students were included in the conversation about the new dining provider last year.
“Working with Parkhurst has been — they are dedicated to the students, they want the student feedback, they want, you know, to know that their priority is student dining, is the students and their experiences,” Yeckley said. “And it’s been very apparent in the conversations and meetings that we’ve had.”