FSDs are most likely to turn to design firms (51%), news websites and magazines (40%) or their peers (38%) when looking for inspiration for redesigns or new construction, FoodService Director’s2017 Operator Renovation Survey found. But at least four times a semester, Greg Minner, director of Purdue Dining and Catering, looks to a different resource—the university’s industrial design students.
“I don’t have anything against outside consultants, but they’re so used to doing the job that they kind of use a cookie-cutter approach based on other universities,” Minner says. “You have a group of people who have eaten with us, and now they’re approaching problems from a perspective of, ‘I ate here, I know the issue, here’s what I think works.’”