If you go to Bentley, I know it wasn’t for the food. Our campus is notorious for our bad food – specifically in our main dining hall, the 921 (or Seasons, if you’re a real one). Students have complained every year about the quality and taste of the food we are served. If you’re smart, by the time you’re an upperclassman you will have dropped the meal plan and started grocery shopping and cooking yourself – like me and my roommate. But if you’re a freshman or living in a suite with no kitchen, Bentley requires you to purchase a meal plan. Now this sounds annoying, but it gets worse – let me tell you about the catering policy.
Bentley University has a contract with food service company Sodexo to exclusively provide on-campus dining options. This even extends to special events. For example, if your club wants to cater food, you must order through Sodexo unless the food you are requesting is outside of Sodexo’s capabilities (like cultural foods). This doesn’t sound that bad right off the bat, but the main issue rests in how expensive Sodexo food is despite its mediocre quality.
Looking at Sodexo’s catering menu for Bentley, you can tell the prices are inflated. For example, a gallon of lemonade is $15 – and trust me, I’ve had the lemonade before and it just tastes like sugar-y water dyed neon yellow. Let me know why I can’t just pick up a carton of Newman’s Own for $3 *rolls eyes*
In my own organizations’ experiences, we’ve been scammed by Sodexo before. For example, Her Campus loves a good cheese board at our meetings. But because Sodexo offers cheese boards on their menu we are required to order through them. The cheese board costs $50.99 and only comes with random cubes of cheese, some grapes, and store-bought crackers. And in case you were wondering – no, the cheese board was not big and yes, it was pretty bad.
The worst part about this is that AIA (the Allocation and Internal Audit Committee) has been cutting budgets for most clubs due to limited funds. Because of this, we don’t have much to go around and we usually have to make ends meet by coming up with free and fun event ideas and picking and choosing what we can afford. But because we have to order from Sodexo, we’re stuck paying $50 for a tiny cheese board that we could’ve gotten for cheaper and better quality elsewhere.
Speaking on behalf of all student organizations, we want more flexibility when catering food for our events. If we are going to be forced to order through a specific vendor, we should at least be getting good, reasonably priced food. And if we are going to get our budgets cut, we should be allowed to pursue cheaper catering options outside of Sodexo. It feels unfair that the school is giving us less funding but is still forcing us to buy expensive, mediocre food from their contracted caterer.
So if you work for Bentley, Sodexo, or are part of AIA and are reading this, please understand how frustrated we are with these policies. We just want good food at our events – is that too much to ask?