At a Glance
- 43,000 students, 9,000 on meal plans
- $50 million annual revenue
- 6 dining halls, 14 retail units
Accomplishments
- Instilling a mantra among staff to approach their jobs as though they were meeting the needs of their own children
- Guiding staff to create specialty restaurants and themed events to increase menu variety and improve the customer experience
- Pushing the department to become a leader in sustainability and health and wellness
- Creating inclusive solutions to meet the needs of the university’s most nutritionally challenged students
When Dawn Aubrey was employed by The Seiler Corp. in the 1990s, much of her work involved going into struggling foodservice accounts and putting out the operational fires that were plaguing them. Since joining the University of Illinois, in Urbana–Champaign, in 2006 as associate director of housing for dining services, however, she has been a fire starter, igniting her staff’s passion for food and watching that passion in turn fire up substantive and lasting change.
“The student experience needed to be improved—and quickly,” Aubrey says she realized on her arrival. “The only way to do that in a way that would be truly sustainable was to have staff see that you believe in them, that they’re capable and that they’re professionals. That took a lot of time and a lot of energy, but it’s paying dividends now that I didn’t even anticipate.”
That was quickly evident to Aubrey’s boss, Alma Sealine, when she joined Illinois in 2013 as director of housing.
“When I arrived I saw a dining program that was highly respected, with many options for students and an amazing commitment to sustainability,” Sealine says. “In Dawn, I saw a woman dedicated to seeing dining services succeed in ways that would be a benchmark for other programs across the nation.”
Under Aubrey’s leadership, dining commons have been renovated and specialty “restaurants” have been added to increase menu variety. Menus now reflect the true diversity of the campus. Aubrey says Illinois has the largest international population of any campus in the nation. Sustainability has been given a heavy emphasis, as has nutrition. As a result, Aubrey notes, “Instead of following trends, we’re starting to set trends.”
The business of foodservice
Aubrey, a native of Maryland, was raised by her grandparents. She gained her love of cooking from her grandmother and was preparing family meals by the time she was 12. But a career in foodservice wasn’t in her plans.
“When I started school I thought I was going to be a doctor, like my grandfather,” she says. “I started out in chemistry and I loved it.”
Her grandmother, however, wanted her to go into business, and so Aubrey eventually earned a degree in economics and mathematics at the College of Notre Dame (now Notre Dame of Maryland University). But as a student needing money, Aubrey worked for The Seiler Corp. in the college’s foodservice department. The experience would end up defining her career.
“They were shocked at how much I knew about cooking,” Aubrey says. “After a year I was promoted to student manager. I set up catering events by myself, handled ordering and inventory and if the breakfast cook didn’t show up, I cooked. They told me it was like having another full-time manager on duty.”
After graduation, when Aubrey found herself at a crossroads between continuing her education or joining the workforce, Seiler stepped in with a job offer that settled the matter.
To call Aubrey’s professional life before Illinois nomadic would be an understatement. From 1989 to 2006 she worked for Seiler, Sodexo and Chartwells. She worked in every segment of non-commercial foodservice except senior living, traveling from Michigan to Maine. But she still managed to honor the promise she had made to her grandmother to continue her education: In 2000 she earned her MBA from the University of Pittsburgh.
“When I worked for Seiler, I became really good at fixing things,” Aubrey explains. “They referred to me as the fireman. Wherever there was a problem, they would send me. As soon as I finished I was moved to the next spot, and that’s a really hard way to live. Work is great, but you need more than work.”
So one day she sat down with her partner and the two decided to move to Maine. Aubrey got a job as director of dining services at the University of Maine, where she found that she excelled at “selling” her department. She recalls giving “86 presentations in one semester” in a successful attempt to drum up support for revenue bonds to renovate dining facilities.
But after a falling out with university administrators, Aubrey found herself desiring another career move. She traveled to the Midwest to take her current job, and her life has settled down considerably as a result.
Selling herself to the Illini
Aubrey’s first task was to motivate a staff that she sensed was fully capable of making changes, so long as they believed in the path she was taking them on. Knowing that many of her staff had families, she related her goals in terms parents would readily grasp and internalize. “I wanted them to identify with the experience parents have dropping their kids off at school,” she says. “I said, ‘What would you want your child’s experience to be? What would make them want to stay and get an education?’ It’s about how to make the connection between the customers and the people actually making the meal. Everyone bears an invisible sign, and that sign says, ‘I am important.’ We have to be sure we read that sign, even with each other.”
Executive Chef Carrie Anderson, who has worked at Illinois under four different directors, says that Aubrey quickly established herself as someone who “walks the talk.”
“Dawn is one of the smartest people I’ve ever been around, and when you meet her she looks every bit the businesswoman that she is,” Anderson says. “But as soon as she smiles, you know that she’s also very inviting and personable. She genuinely cares about each of us and is generous with her time and her knowledge.”
After establishing a rapport with her staff, Aubrey’s first change was a minor tweak. Responding to complaints about lack of variety, she noticed that the four-week menu cycle was the same in all six dining units. So she simply offset the menus, starting half her units on week one and the other half on week three.
“It didn’t require a huge amount of effort, and yet it doubled the number of choices across all the units,” she explains. “That simple change got such a positive response; it was really interesting.”
The next step was to find out exactly what students were looking for and then building menus to fully satisfy them. That meant launching a recipe-testing frenzy, creating new items and bringing students in to do taste panels.
“We do this four times a year,” Aubrey says. “But back then, we were doing them every week. Once items were fully vetted, we would incorporate them into the menu.”
New specialty restaurants have further increased variety. At present there are eight: Better Burger, Cracked Egg Café, La Cocina Mexicana, Field of Greens, Leafy!, Oodles, Soul Ingredient and Taste of Asia. At pre-scheduled times, an entire dining hall will be transformed into one of these restaurants. For instance, Monday evenings Ikenberry Dining Hall becomes Soul Ingredient, featuring a Southern-style menu. On Fridays, Illinois Street Hall becomes Taste of Asia, where the menu is varied enough to include everything from Cantonese cuisine to East Indian food.
Sustainability and health
Creating new dining locations and revamping menus aren’t Aubrey’s only focus. On the sustainability front, she quickly rattles off the university’s accomplishments: the first Big 10 school to go trayless, local purchases at 27% of budget, a 97% waste-diversion rate, a sustainable farm on campus, vermicomposting and even a closed food loop in one dining unit.
“We are the only department on campus that recycles glass,” she adds. “We have a digester that creates a lipid-free gray water. We use coffee grounds to have mushrooms grown for us.”
Similar efforts have been put into wellness issues. Each dining hall has stations that feature healthier options and vegetarian and vegan cuisine. Two of the specialty restaurants, Field of Greens and Leafy!, focus on vegetarian items.
For students looking for nutrition and allergen information, there’s an app for that, called eatsmart. Aubrey says the app will even use customers’ GPS coordinates to direct them to the nearest locations to get the food they want or need.
But Aubrey believes the future of health and wellness can be found in a new program called Inclusive Solutions. “This program is for students who have the most severe diets [such as combination allergies and challenges digesting certain proteins],” she says. “Students who qualify can place an order online for the kind of food they would like prepared. We don’t even require that they give us advance notice. We’d prefer that they do, but they can literally sit in a dining hall, place an order and we will make it for them immediately. It’s working out very well.”
