Hopkins will move to self-operated dining services in 2022

Johns Hopkins University will pivot to self-operated dining in July 2022, a move that advocates hope will allow the university more opportunities to purchase sustainable, local and humanely grown food.

Hopkins’ existing contract with Bon Appetit Management Company, a subsidiary of Compass Group, one of three major companies that contract dining services for college campuses in the United States, was originally signed in 2013 and will end in 2022. Prior to that, the campus’s food service was provided by Aramark, another major provider.

Bon Appetit dining workers at Hopkins will be offered comparable jobs as members of the university’s staff. No on-campus dining establishments will close or be replaced when the contract with Bon Appetit ends, though the university is planning to open new locations within the next five years.

The shift to self-operated dining will build on work Bon Appetit has done on campus to “prioritize seasonal foods and locally-grown produce,” Hopkins said in an announcement. The university will consult with faculty, staff and students to build its dining system over the coming year.

Student advocates have been pushing Hopkins towards more sustainable dining choices since 2013, when the university signed the Real Food Challenge, a pledge to make a certain percentage of their food purchases “real food” by 2020. Hopkins chose to commit to 35%, exceeding the challenge’s recommended 20%.

According to Real Food Generation, the national organization that created the Real Food Challenge to encourage colleges and universities to shift to more local, humane food practices, “real food” is defined by a number of parameters. To qualify as “real food,” it must be grown at farms that are small, or medium-sized, that treat their workers fairly and that aim to limit greenhouse gas emissions, among other things.

Anim Steel, the executive director of Real Food Generation, said that shifting to self-operated dining isn’t necessarily the only way for schools to go about achieving this goal. Universities can also work with their dining services providers to try to purchase more “real food.” Real Food Generation has also made attempts — thus far, unsuccessfully — to convince major providers to commit to prioritizing “real food” across the campuses they serve.

But moving to self-operated dining does offer universities the most flexibility over their own dining services, as well as transparency about where, exactly, the food students eat comes from. 

“If you’re really going to dream the biggest, become self-operated,” Steel said, noting that it’s not a step that many schools have taken yet. Of the schools within Real Food Generation’s network, Hopkins is the first in several years to move towards self-operation. Nationwide, approximately 81% of higher education institutions contract their dining services providers, according to a 2020 report by Real Food Generation.

But it’s a solution more and more students are pushing for.

Real Food Hopkins, the university’s chapter of the organization, has been working to help the university achieve its “real food” goal since it was first set in 2013. 

Christina Francis, a Hopkins senior studying environmental science and an executive board member of Real Food Hopkins, said club members emailed the university frequently in the fall, knowing that Hopkins’ contract with Bon Appetit would be up soon and hoping to be part of the process of finding the school’s next provider. But club members didn’t know self-operation was even being considered until about a week before the school announced the decision publicly.

The university has successfully increased its purchasing of “real food” in partnership with Bon Appetit over the past eight years, Francis said. The university reports that 31% of the food it purchases is now “real food,” just short of the 35% goal, which equates to spending about $2.7 million dollars on “real food” annually. The school has also achieved sustainability goals in partnership with Bon Appetit, such as using a robust composting system and limiting kitchen waste.

“I can’t deny the strides towards sustainability that Bon Appetit has helped Hopkins to achieve,” Francis said. “Bon Appetit was really open to helping Hopkins to be successful in the Real Food Challenge … they were really helpful in looking for vendors that were local.”

But moving to a self-operated model, she says, will not only allow Hopkins to continue purchasing sustainable local food; it will also create a sense of accountability that wasn’t there before.

“We can no longer pass off the blame to Bon Appetit. Hopkins is saying, as an institution, they’re ready to be held accountable for the consequences of their food-purchasing decisions,” she said.

Beyond sustainability and transparency, the shift to local food will allow the university the opportunity to build relationships with local, minority-owned businesses and uplift the Baltimore area economy, tying into the goals of HopkinsLocal, a commitment of both the university and health system to hire locally and work with Baltimore businesses.

“Hopkins transition to a self-operated dining system is a really big win for the greater Baltimore community,” Francis said. “I’m excited to see what’s next.”