Note: This is a corrected version of an earlier story. Correction appended below.

MONTREAL — McGill University students craving a doughnut were out of luck when classes began on Tuesday. Whereas the University of Western Ontario’s campus has 14 Tim Hortons restaurants, McGill’s lone outlet, located in the basement of the Redpath Library, was shuttered last week. In its place is a spanking-new Première Moisson bakery. The days of gloomy cafeterias, sad steam tables and food complaints by the hundreds appear to be disappearing, as well. For the last five years, McGill has been revamping and upgrading its food and hospitality services. Touring the campus and seeing the plethora of choice in its dining halls, lineups at brand-name restaurants, food trucks parked on the green, and healthy vending machine options, there is little doubt that food is enjoying a fair share of the buzz on campus this week. “At McGill, you don’t see kids sucking on a Pepsi,” said fourth-year Arts student Zoe Holl. “You see girls with their yoga mats holding a Liquid Nutrition kale smoothie, or hipsters drinking coffee out of a Mason jar.” Indeed, times are a changin.’ The food service and hospitality department of the university oversees between 4 million and 5 million food transactions a year, ranging from a cup of coffee to some 12,000 full meals served daily. The annual budget hovers near the $20-million mark, making McGill one of the largest food-service providers in Montreal alongside the Montreal Casino, the Palais des Congrès, and the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. And that’s while operating only eight months of the year. There are currently 3,700 students living on McGill’s two campuses (downtown and Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue), 2,500 of whom opt for a mandatory meal plan. Beyond campus residents, about 12,000 students opt for some sort of meal plan, all of which are accessed through an ID card that can be used at some 30 food locations on campus. Save for a few residences where students have opted for smaller or no meal plans, as a general rule students in residence are forbidden to cook in their rooms. Most of their meals are eaten on or around campus. That’s a lot of people to please. And it looks like it’s working. “Five years ago, an overall mission of the university was to improve the food, housing, services and recreation,” says Mathieu Laperle, McGill’s senior director of student housing and hospitality services. “If you look at what was going on here 10 years ago, it was not really appealing or interesting. There was never a clear plan.” University executive chef Oliver de Volpi concurs: “Back then, there would be six steam wells containing a pasta, a fish, a meat, a vegetarian dish, a starch and a vegetable, along with fountain drinks, desserts and a small salad bar if you were lucky. There was a large shift in what we thought food should be at the university, and we went from offering what we serving for the last 20 years straight to saying, ‘No, we need to start looking at the models out there,’ to determine what we felt our food should be.” Along with nutritional adviser Monique Lauzon, Laperle and de Volpi began McGill’s food service overhaul.

“We looked at sustainability,” says de Volpi, “we looked at nutrition, we looked at culinary excellence. How do you make a $20-million food system sustainable? How do you offer a nutritious meal to students who had never eaten on their own and expect a hamburger and french fries to be the meal that they eat out, yet can’t eat that every single day? At first we were winging it, copying other models, meeting with students. We wanted to prove ourselves. By starting with that push toward sustainability and succeeding on a few goals right away, it brought us credibility and goodwill around campus. We were a department that was disliked five years ago, but now we’ve gone to being a darling on campus that people use as an example of sustainability and leadership.” By adopting a mixed model, with one main food provider and smaller contracted providers, McGill’s hospitality-services goal was to manage everything: the vision, the mission, the values. Hours of service were increased, labour costs were controlled and by regrouping purchases, de Volpi managed to acquire a better quality of product while reducing food cost, which meant no increase in fees for students. At between $4,000 and $4,600 for the full meal plan for the eight-month school year, no wonder students demanded change. “When I arrived in 2009, there were over 200 grievances stacked on my desk,” says Laperle. “Last year, we had less than 10. We’re facing a new generation now who don’t consider it a special occasion to go to a restaurant. Today, students expect the same level of food and service on campus that they can get at a restaurant on Ste-Catherine St.” On the university scene, McGill was never known for its food the way University California, Berkeley and the University of Massachusetts are in the United States, or Guelph University and UBC are in Canada. Yet since the school started making changes, industry people are not only talking about McGill, but coming in from different Canadian and American universities to see what they’re doing. McGill’s success impressed other Montreal universities, too, proof being de Volpi was asked by the Université de Montréal to sit on its committee to help choose a food distributor. With such an emphasis on improving student life, could food become a determining factor for a student choosing a university? “I don’t think they will come here specifically for food,” says de Volpi. “But we’re hearing from a few U.S. universities that the food service actually influences a student’s decision in choosing a university. We know it has an impact on the everyday life of students. In the long run, I’m sure it does. McGill is known as a great university for life outside of classes. So it doesn’t hurt.” The hospitality overhaul extended far beyond the plate, as the general upgrading included beautifying the dining rooms and other eating locations. “Our idea was to create destinations,” says Laperle. “I hated the name ‘cafeteria,’ so it was changed to ‘dining hall,’ a student space where they could eat great food.” “It was so ugly before!” adds Lauzon. “Antiquated ... depressing. You didn’t want to stay. But now, we see students hanging out with their laptops, and there’s music in the background. It’s wonderful, a huge transformation.”

The timing of McGill’s food awakening coincides with the seemingly endless food revolution gripping North Americans and Europeans obsessed with food TV, restaurant culture, food trucks, Instagram food pictures and school lunches wholesome enough to merit the Jamie Oliver stamp of approval. University students are sure to be the first to question food issues such as antibiotics, fair trade, sustainability, or whether the apples on the cafeteria shelves are organic and/or local. Those were priorities for management, as well. “We work with a food service company based in England called Compass Group Canada, which is the biggest food provider in the world,” says de Volpi. “We contract out Compass to run 40 per cent of what’s on campus for food. We were very specific about what we wanted. Three years ago, there were many ready-made items. A year ago, they came in saying everything would be made from scratch. Last year, at 75 per cent of the locations we were serving Campbell’s or Lipton soup. Now, all soups and vinaigrettes are homemade. There are six bakers on site making bread, fresh pasta and cookies all from scratch. They must purchase the eggs and seasonal produce from our farm at the Macdonald Campus (see sidebar). “There are nutritional standards to follow from our registered dietitian. Thirty per cent of the meat were are serving on campus is Quebec beef raised without antibiotics, 30 per cent of our chicken (of which 10 per cent is organic) comes from independent producers, 40 per cent of the seafood being served is MSC (Marine Stewardship Council) certified, our fresh pork is purchased from Viandes du Breton here in Quebec. We’re also a 100-per-cent fair trade designated campus. All the coffee is fair trade. We even have fair trade chocolate bars sold in the vending machines. And we can go further.” All this for just $7.25 a meal at lunch time and $8.25 for dinner in the dining halls (prices vary at brand restaurants) might sound a little too good to be true. “Granted, we can’t do everything,” says de Volpi. “We can’t afford 100-per-cent organic chicken. Our biggest fruit and vegetable supplier is our own farm for August to October. But the rest of the year, we’re buying Savoura tomatoes. And not No. 1, but No. 2 grade. But at least they’re local, greenhouse-grown tomatoes.” A lunchtime tour of the Royal Victoria College residence’s dining hall, one of five dining halls at McGill’s downtown campus, offered a glimpse of just how this system works. The choice is impressive. There are stir-fry stations, pasta stations, sandwich stations, omelette stations, grill stations and a salad bar that would put any all-you-can eat restaurant to shame. Hot meals include several curries (one vegetarian) and there are boxed sushi lunches and vegan sandwiches on offer, as well. Some 600 students swarm this eating space at meal times, and considering most of them eat here daily for a reasonable amount of money, variety is essential. And to avoid the dreaded “freshman 15” (the 15 pounds it is estimated many freshmen gain their first year in residence), nutrition is another priority.