End to Sodexo’s monopoly at TU Delft

The new ‘Catering Vision’ will bring an end to the current monopoly held by catering firm Sodexo. This has already been somewhat diluted recently by the presence of outdoor catering trucks on the campus. The Vision will extend this development to the TU Delft buildings themselves. In the future, several catering firms will be operating various types of facility. However, this does not (yet) mean a total disappearance of Sodexo. The contract with the catering firm runs until June 2017.

In the plan, catering is divided into several different levels:on upper floors in large buildings and central sites in smaller buildings, there will be ‘walls of luxury vending machines’ on the ground floor close to the entrance of buildings, there will be smaller ‘living rooms’, with freshly prepared products, microwaves and preferably also a terrace area; TU-Noord (Architecture and the Built Environment) will have a deluxe version of this concept four zones (the Aula building, between IDE and 3mE, in the sport centre, and TU-Zuid) will have a large restaurant, possibly with various operators. There will also be terrace areas here and places for catering trucks to set up, creating a type of marketplace in the Aula building, there will be a faculty club with à la carte food and table service

The atmosphere of the cafés, restaurants and coffee corners, as well as the type of food they offer and their opening times, will depend on local preferences. This is intended to ensure there is a varied offering and the operation of market forces. This additional diversity will also mean that, in the future, not every faculty will have a fully-fledged restaurant and there will be more variation in terms of price and quality levels.

TU Delft believes that this Catering Vision will enable it to ‘meet the needs of users more effectively’. In recent years, many people have complained about the quality and price of the Sodexo food, as demonstrated by the Facebook page ‘Sodexo we’ve had enough’. Surveys also consistently show that students and staff, especially those from abroad, are not satisfied with the offering.

The Catering Vision places great emphasis on the concept of a living campus, which ‘offers all facilities and where people meeting each other is central’. The University is convinced that good- quality catering plays an important part in that. “In order to (continue to) achieve our ambition of being a leading international university, it is of great importance that we make significant improvements in the quality and diversity of catering on campus in the years ahead.”

But the ‘attractive campus’ referred to in the Vision comes at a cost. TU Delft estimates that it will need to invest 6.7 million euros in suitable locations. Much of that is already included in the University real estate strategy. On top of this, there will be ‘front-end costs’ for operations amounting to approximately € 250,000. That figure may ultimately turn out to be lower, but the catering will not be completely self-financing, because the University wishes to maintain its key conditions of a relatively cheap basic product range, extensive opening hours and reasonable prices overall.

In implementing the Vision, the University will take account of its own real estate strategy. Based on that, with a bit of luck, the first new facilities could open in 2016 and the last in 2018 or 2019.