BY KAHLA STATEMA | The Statesman
UMD dining services contains the Plaza food court, the Center Court restaurant, the Dining Center, Northern Shores Coffee and Catering Services, making UMD’s kitchen one of the largest kitchens in Duluth.
Dining services make about 9,000 meals a day. The food court serves nearly 3,500 customers every day.
The food court is going on 13 years old and sits where the old library used to be located. It was called the Kirby Cafe before it became the food court in 2003. The Burger Hub and Taste of Italia are the only original food vendors.
Today, you can find a larger variety of food options in the food court. Great Lakes Grains is the newest addition. Sombrero's Mexican Fiesta was recently brought back due to high popularity.
According to the associate director of dining services, Liz Abrahamson, five different companies are use to providing the dining services with their products, three of which are local.
“We’re all about going local first,” Abrahamson said.
The companies are Upper Lakes Foods, Fraboni, Sysco, US Banks Food Industry and Twin Ports Paper and Supply.
The Burger Hub receives their grass-fed beef patties from Upper Lakes Foods, which is from the local farm Thousand Hills Cattle Co. in Cannon Falls, Minnesota.
The 100 percent ground beef patties from the Hub are provided by Fraboni’s, another local food vendor from Hibbing.
Like the dining center, the food court gets in-season produce from UMD’s farm, the Student Agriculture Project (SAP), such as cucumbers, carrots and tomatoes.
“We’ll switch back to our local vendor when the farm is done growing for the season,” Abrahamson said.
Other fresh produce comes from farms in Wrenshall and Barnum, Minnesota.
Hundreds of pounds of Bayfield apples and cider are provided to the UMD dining services as well as apples from the UMD orchard and other orchards across Minnesota.
During snowstorms, managers of the food court stay overnight to provide on-campus students with something to eat in order to prevent anyone from having to leave campus to get food.
“This is their home,” Abrahamson said. “So this is their kitchen.”
Dining services has recently taken out all peanuts from their food and though the kitchens are not gluten-free, they are still gluten-friendly.
The food court and the rest of dining services is completely self-supported and is the only self-operating dining center in the entire University of Minnesota system.
Recently, dining services has made changes to support all university goers.
“We now have what are called off-campus meal plans which are for all students and staff,” Abrahamson said. “You can get up to five meals a week.” The meal plans for off-campus students and staff allow access to UMD’s Dining Center and are $599 for five meals a week for 16 weeks.