When it comes to campus dining, the right partner can make all the difference not just in food quality, but in creating spaces where students want to gather, connect, and build community. Hear from Lisa Donovan, Director of Finance and Auxiliary Enterprises at Davenport University, about how Creative Dining Services has transformed their campus dining experience.

Key Takeaways

• Partnership drives innovation and flexibility. Creative Dining’s collaborative approach enables Davenport to continuously expand dining options and customize menus to meet evolving student needs.
• Multiple venues serve diverse student lifestyles. The Caf dining hall, The HUBcoffee shop, and The Den grill each serve different purposes, from sit-down community meals to quick mobile-ordered pickups for busy commuters.
• Experience transforms dining spaces into community hubs. Events, giveaways, and engaging programming (including a mechanical bull!) make dining locations gathering places where students want to spend time with friends and teammates.
• Catering supports campus-wide success. From homecoming alumni brunches to football game concessions, Creative Dining provides quality food service for major university events that enhance the overall campus experience.
• Regular collaboration sparks creative solutions. Monthly meetings and open communication led to innovations like weekly themed barbecues, which became so popular that remote-working staff came to campus just for them.
• Quality speaks for itself. When vendors from Kansas City (known for its barbecue) attended a campus event, they praised the food and asked, “Where was this when we were in college?”
• Financial transparency builds trust. Monthly financial reviews ensure budget accountability and strategic stewardship, allowing Davenport to focus on student experience and meal plan retention from fall to winter semester.

Transcript

I’m Lisa Donovan, director of finance and auxiliary enterprises at Davenport University at our main campus in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The approach that Creative Dining takes is to be a partner with you. Through that partnership, we have been able to provide more and more options to our students: we have the Caf, which is the dining hall where they have events, they have giveaways, they have prizes. Last year, there was even a mechanical bull at one of the events, and the students loved it. Those events really make the dining experience in the Caf very important to the students.

We also have the HUB, which is our coffee shop and the Den which is our grill. For commuters, that area has become quite a mainstay. They can order their food through the remote app, and as soon as class is over they stop down in the Den or the HUB and pick up their food. So that has been huge for the commuters to be able to access their food quickly and easily.

At Davenport, for our major events, we always are inviting Creative Dining to provide the food services there. One of our biggest events for catering is Homecoming. There’s an alumni brunch; there’s a tent; and there’s the food at the football game. The Creative Dining staff really steps up and provides quality food at all those locations.

I meet with Creative Dining on a regular basis, and we are very collaborative and coming up with different ideas. One of the ideas that I mentioned is the staff really loved the barbecues that we were having in the summer. So I suggested, “let’s have them weekly.” And the next thing I know, I get this full menu of barbecues with themes for every week. What was amazing was seeing how excited the staff were. Even if they were working remote, they came in, and they loved it.

And for one of the barbecues, I had two vendors that were coming in to meet with me, one before lunch and one after lunch. For one of them, I was a little apprehensive because they were from Kansas City, where obviously they have good barbecue. They praised it and said, “Where was this food when we were in college?” They really enjoyed the barbecue and were very impressed by what our dining staff can do.

Creative Dining meets with us monthly to review our financial performance. They are always looking to be good stewards of our budget and make sure that the dollars they are spending are spent wisely and appropriately. We also really focus on each semester, especially from fall to winter, making sure that we’re able to retain the students who had meal plans in the fall so that those students come back and have meal plans in the winter.

Creative Dining has transformed our campus from a dining perspective, giving the students a spot to not only get their meals but also to hang out, to spend time with their friends—their teammates—and really create an experience. That’s what’s most important to Davenport.