The recently renovated foodservice facilities on the West Campus of the University of Washington in Seattle, which I had the opportunity to tour this week, are impressive. They include a waitservice restaurant, called Cultivate, that counts among its menu items The Burger, ranked as one of the 20 best burgers in the Puget Sound area. There is a residence dining hall called Local Point that features a demonstration kitchen where Executive Chef Tracey Macrae not only offers a Chef’s Table but also conducts classes for up to 50 people.
But the most impressive element of the renovations that took place over the last three years on West Campus, at least to me, is the District Market at Alder Hall. This is not some glorified convenience market, designed to provide students with some frozen dinners, cereal and snack items and a few varieties of fruit. This is a grocery store more than worthy of the urban neighborhood of which this area of campus is a part.
“This is our first attempt at a full-service grocery store,” says Jeremiah Trammell, who is the administrators for cafes and express markets on the 24,000-student campus. “We modeled it after a Whole Foods or Central Market.”
Although District Market isn’t on the scale of your typical Whole Foods, it does a pretty good job of mimicking the feel and ambiance of one. A walk through the store reveals some 5,000 SKUs: breads, cereals, fresh produce, dairy items, frozen foods, a small selection of meats and seafood, and the requisite snack items college kids crave. There is also a full-service deli that features meats sliced to order, as many as 16 composed salads, and a rotating array of hot entrees and sides that are packed to go.
There is even a small housewares section to provide apartment dwellers with some of the kitchen, bed and bath items they might need from time to time.
“About half of our items are things that we may only sell one of a day,” explains Trammell. “But the other half we sell exponentially. We’re busy enough that it’s worth having those one-a-day items.”
How busy is District Market? “On a normal day we do $32,000 to $35,000,” says Trammell. As I watched the line of student customers, at least 25 deep, snake through the store, it wasn’t hard to take Trammell at his word.
As busy as District Market is, things can only get better, he adds. When a nearby residence hall is completed next year, there will be space for another 1,100 students to live on West Campus—and shop at the market.
Inside the District Market space, you’ll also find The Husky Grind, a coffee shop that sells coffee that Housing and Food Service buys and has roasted locally. Husky Grind is an impressive enough operation in its own right, with fair-trade coffees procured from countries such as Guatemala, Honduras, Burundi and Ethiopia. There are even plans for the university to secure its own on-site roaster. But that’s a story for another blog.