Food on campus tends to bring to mind an unfortunate marriage of the overpriced, the underwhelming, and the unhealthy. Fortunately for the UBC community, AMS Executive Chef Ryan Bissell is doing his best to change that.
As in any business model, cost-effectiveness and quality are top priorities. “We’ve worked very hard with our suppliers to ensure that we are getting the best quality products at a very reasonable price,” said Bissell. However, there is more to Bissell’s approach than sheer mathematics; his is a revolutionary vision for a campus that has been sorely lacking in the food department.
The Nest’s new menu is not your average student food. In the spirit of the academic audience to whom they are catering, Bissell and his team have done their research: endless tastings and tweakings played an important part of the process of overhauling the old menu. The educational theme is also reflected in Bissell’s approach to preparation. Since roughly 80 per cent of food products are now made in-house, staff are taught to see raw ingredients through to finished product.
Though some of us are used to the phrases ‘in-house’ and ‘handmade’ being tossed around as justification for higher menu prices, Bissell’s commitment to handcrafted food does the difficult double task of maintaining quality and reasonable prices.
When asked about the cost of the new line-up of ingredients, Bissell replied, “There’s a really unique misperception about handcrafted quality versus pre-purchased products. A lot of the time, pre-purchased product that’s prepped will be more expensive than a handmade product. When you’re just buying the raw ingredients and prepping it yourself, that is where you actually get to save. It costs you a little bit more in labour, but in that sense I’m actually teaching people how to make the product. So that makes me a lot more confident in my staff, and how everybody works downstairs [in the prep kitchen].”
It helps that the AMS is one of the largest independent food purchasers in the Lower Mainland, giving them the buying power to order in bulk. The prices of the Flip Side burgers ($4.95 for a basic hamburger and $6.75 with bacon and cheddar) are a testament to this strategy -- made with 100 per cent beef and pressed in-house, all that was needed to keep the cost down was a 20,000 kilo order of meat for the next year.
This type of resourceful thinking not only means that those buying food on campus don’t have to suffer a huge budgetary strain, but also that it grants the AMS the leverage to do business on their own terms. Sustainability has been a priority for all of the Nest’s operations, and Bissell has ensured that this is the case for all aspects of food production as well.
“FreshPoint [the buyer used by the AMS] works with local suppliers to really get their local product in, and we’ve actually gotten them to switch from sending us anything in cardboard. So we use reusable totes for all of our produce,” said Bissell. “And to get a company like FreshPoint to do that… they’re owned by Jim Pattison. They’re a big company. And we got them to stop sending us anything in cardboard. So we’ve started to reduce our waste on the input line as well as on the output line.”
A respect for seasonality also plays a part in the menu planning. The menu at Palate, for example, is slated to change each term, reflecting the availability of local ingredients. Produce that is currently in season also makes its way onto the shelves of the commissary kitchen in the form of jarred, canned, and pickled preserves, to be incorporated into future dishes when the time is ripe. The amount of thought that goes into some of the ingredients – planned months in advance – is evidence of the resourcefulness and creativity that Bissell brings to the table.
This campus food revolution did not appear out of thin air, however. Throughout the planning phases for the Nest, the AMS has been conscious of the needs and interests of their student body. A lot of what the Nest now has to offer derives from the consultation process that began as far back as 2009.
“It’s not like we sat down at a table and said, ‘Let’s do this.’ It was more like, ‘What does this community want to see?’… They really put a lot of thought into finding out what the priorities were,” said Ava Nasiri, AMS VP Administration.
Now more than ever, healthy eating is a priority for many students. “We really looked at how people eat on campus. There’s one thing that we noticed last summer – there’s nowhere to get a salad. You couldn’t really buy healthy. So [Palate], primarily, will be our healthy option,” said Bissell.
“Palate, from my perspective, definitely fills in the gap for those students that live on campus that are like, ‘I am not going to buy a whole thing of lettuce, and wash it, and eat vegetables,’ but if it’s nicely packaged, and a decent price, then they’ll get it,” said Nasiri.
Although the amount of time that goes into the planning, preparing, and cooking can only be described as laborious, Bissell has worked to ensure that this is reflected only in the quality of the output. Cutting the wait times and line-ups for food has been an overall goal: Lowercase was conceived of as a solution for quick coffee when Uppercase is too busy, and the oven at Pie R 2 has a 20-pizza capacity. The number of different restaurants in the same building is also instrumental. “We have the ability to really increase the speed of service because we have a lot more variety open,” said Bissell.
Bissell has demonstrated his commitment to putting forward student-friendly, delicious food in a sustainable and cost-effective way. Was there any other motivation behind his work, however? “What I wanted to do was give UBC Food Services a little kick in the ass,” said Bissell. “Wake up, everyone.”