Hollywood’s glitz and glamor has steeped into Emerson Kitchen, the new dining location of Boston-based Emerson College’s satellite residential program in Los Angeles. Through a Sodexo program called FöD, an acronym for Food on Demand, touchscreen kiosks and a smartphone ordering application allow students to order menu items on demand. Emerson Kitchen staff deliver the items to the students while they wait, typically within four to six minutes, or the items are ready for pickup at a predetermined time.
“The touchscreen kiosks are stationary kiosks that are inside [Emerson Kitchen],” explains Don Carter, director of facilities and dining services for Sodexo at Emerson Los Angeles. The free app, which is available on all Apple products, brings up the entire menu for users to peruse. Users can then select their menu items and what time they want to pick up their order. Customers pay when they receive their food.
Regular menu updates keep students engaged with the new facility, which also houses a convenience store and Sodexo’s Jazzman’s Café, a coffee shop that serves beverages and cold to-go food items such as sandwiches and salads. Carter says Emerson Kitchen has been positively received since it opened in January. To keep interest high, the dining service team frequently adjusts the menu. “We’re going to be changing 25% of our menu once a month,” Carter says. “We have to alleviate any kind of menu fatigue” because students frequent the space so often.
Located on Hollywood’s famous Sunset Boulevard amidst film and television production studios, Emerson Kitchen serves up to 217 students studying at the LA Emerson branch, in addition to the public, traffic from which is “slowly increasing,” Carter says. “We’ve done some marketing out in the general area [of the building]. We’re surrounded by a lot of studios, so we get a lot of their traffic in, especially for lunch, and a little less in the evening. But we’re building up to about 25% of our patrons now are nonstudents.”