Out of the five dining facilities at California Lutheran University, only two are open for breakfast prior to the start of 7:45 a.m. classes.

Cal Lutheran Dining Services operates several on-campus dining establishments in partnership with food services and facilities management company, Sodexo. According to the Cal Lutheran Dining services website, the university’s main dining hall, Ullman Dining, is open for breakfast from 7:30 a.m. to 10 a.m., and Starbucks at Jack’s Corner is open from 7 a.m. to noon.

Ryan Van Ommeren, associate vice president for facilities planning and operations at Cal Lutheran, said dining hall hours are largely determined by the needs of students, and are changed ad hoc, with much of the feedback coming from residential students and student athletes.

Breakfast Hours and Athletics

First-year Cal Lutheran football players, cornerbacks Ian Branch and Elijah Duffy, said it is difficult to find time to eat before early practices.

“I’ll just grab, like, a bar or something and then go to the field,” Branch said. “So I just usually eat [protein] bars and then heat up meals, like, that I get from restaurants or something.” 

Duffy said that practice starts as early as 6 a.m. or sometimes 6:30 a.m. Duffy also said that this can make it difficult for some of the football players who live on campus, especially first-years, to eat an actual breakfast, since both the dining hall and Ullman-To-Go are closed before practice.

“It’s just kind of hard for us not getting like any food in our system sometimes during the morning, especially during practice, but just to be alert and awake,” Duffy said. “There’s some times where I’ll wake up just not being able to have snacks … I’m like mentally not being focused because we don’t have anything in our system, and physically not being able to focus.” 

Branch said that given the opportunity, he would want Ullman-To-Go to be open earlier than the regular dining hall. According to Branch, having the option of grabbing food to go is more convenient; he said he could take it to the locker room to eat in there before heading to practice.

“I would like to stop by and like maybe grab like a muffin or something or grab a fruit or something,” Branch said. “But it would be nice if it could open early just for us guys who are, you know, us teams who are waking up early and everything.” 

Duffy said he agrees that it would be easier for athletes to have an option of grabbing food and taking it to go. Duffy said that he wasn’t aware that this would be the situation he would be in before he committed to the team, but he also said he didn’t know what to expect beforehand. 

Clinton Oie, director of auxiliaries at Cal Lutheran, said in an email interview that Ullman Dining averages approximately 250 to 325 students each weekday for breakfast. According to information sourced from the Cal Lutheran course catalog, approximately 400 students are enrolled in classes that start at 7:45 a.m this semester.

“When we opened Starbucks back in 2014, we deliberately set that time at 7 a.m., to serve students that would not have that window,” Van Ommeren said. 

Van Ommeren said the university has not traditionally heard feedback about changing breakfast hours, other than from a faculty member’s recent feedback. 

Nutritional Effects

Adjunct Mathematics Professor and Adjunct Faculty Senate Representative Vickie Chen said she has spoken to students who are unable to eat breakfast before their classes, which prompted her to bring the issue up in a faculty senate meeting.

“This just came up because my students talked about it. And also because I wanted to get some food on campus one morning and realized I couldn’t get into the cafeteria until 7:30, and there was no takeout until 8:30. But my class starts at 8. And that’s the issue that we’re trying to figure out,” Chen said.

Chen said that some of her students said that they head to the cafeteria at 7:30 a.m., “shovel” their breakfast, and then run to class. Chen said this seems really bad for the overall health of students, and also said she’s seen students altogether skip breakfast and come to class hungry.

“I have seen people come to class hungry more than once, especially during finals,” Chen said. “Last time I started bringing granola bars because I realized that people were taking their final hungry.”

Meal Swipe Value

According to the Dining & Meal Plans section of Cal Lutheran’s website, students are able to redeem one meal swipe on food items for up to $6.25 at Ullman-To-Go, Jamba Juice, Starbucks, and at The Habit Burger Grill. Items over that price have to be supplemented with Munch Money, Flex Dollars, or pocket-money. 

Chen said she has talked about the discrepancy between the value of a meal swipe with her students and in Faculty Senate meetings.

“Given that a food swipe at Ullman constitutes a whole meal, a food swipe anywhere else should constitute a whole meal as well,” Chen said.

Chen said that this isn’t the case, as there are no alternate dining locations where the meal swipe equivalence is the same as a meal swipe from Ullman Dining. According to Chen, most things at Starbucks are over $6, meaning students are unable to afford items using only a meal swipe.

“I mean, technically, just a bagel with nothing is like $2, but, what are you going to do? Eat like three bagels with nothing and hope for the best?” Chen said.

Elizabeth Nepute, Sodexo general manager at Cal Lutheran, said the increase in price is out of the university and Sodexo’s control, citing zone pricing and California’s Fast Food Accountability and Standards Recovery Act as the main reasons for higher prices. While Sodexo has the business license to run The Habit and Starbucks at Cal Lutheran, Nepute said wages and prices are determined by corporate offices for Habit and Starbucks.

“The FAST Act, which was the new basically minimum wage for California, all of California where fast food workers, the minimum wage they can get paid is $20 an hour, which originally, it was $16,” Nepute said. “Obviously, that’s a pretty steep raise for a lot of the workers, about a 20% to 25% raise. And so, that obviously affected all of California and a lot of businesses.”

Student Feedback

Van Ommeren also said food service contracts play a part in both hours and cost for dining services at Cal Lutheran, and the university works with Sodexo to balance labor costs and dining costs for students. Nepute said Sodexo works with Cal Lutheran to amend dining hall operations based on student feedback, survey data, and dining hall attendance. 

“It’s definitely like a mutual discussion,” Nepute said. “A lot of times the hours get set and then we kind of roll with it. And then sometimes we get feedback or, you know, we introduce a new retail location or things change and we may want to make an adjustment. That could either come from their [Cal Lutheran’s] recommendation or could come from our side. We’re not doing anything without them knowing about it.”

Nepute also said that potential changes to dining hours could result in more consequential changes to balance cost, potentially meaning higher dining costs or schedule changes at other on-campus dining locations to balance overall cost.

“Obviously, adjusting hours adjust costs. So, if we can put effort and money towards keeping something else open longer by reducing another unit [dining option] that’s completely dead, those are the kind of things we measure,” Nepute said. “We want to make sure that we’re meeting the needs of the students, without, you know, spending a ton of money and then demanding, you know, higher meal prices and things like that.”

Other Institutions

According to Chapman University alum Carter Hogan, getting to breakfast on the campus of Chapman University was also a difficult task. Hogan said they lived in an off-campus, college apartment, but still had the recommended commuter meal plan so they could eat on campus.

Hogan said breakfast hours at the dining hall opened at 7:30 a.m., while their earliest class began at 7 a.m. Having to take a shuttle to get to class, Hogan said they would often skip breakfast due to conflicting schedules between breakfast and shuttle hours. 

“Due to the shuttle schedule, I wouldn’t be able to make it even if I got there early, because it wouldn’t be open on time,” Hogan said.

Hogan said Chapman University has some grab-and-go stations located around campus. They said these stations helped students get food quickly when needed but also came with a downside. According to Hogan, these stations would close around 7 p.m., and they would not be open during the weekends. 

Hogan said they were an animation student during their time at Chapman University, and they had to take a lot of night classes and sometimes weekend classes. As an animation major, Hogan said that grabbing food was a tough situation.

“We [the animation department] had our own, like, ‘grab-and-go’ station there, and that’s what I used the most. But that one was even more inaccessible, which was kind of frustrating for people like me who spent that much time on that campus,” Hogan said.

Something that Hogan heard a lot of complaining about was the vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free options on their campus. Hogan said that one of their friends had to switch from being vegan to being vegetarian, due to the lack of options for the diet they followed. 

“That was, like, baffling to me. Like, I can’t imagine only having that amount of choices. I might be exaggerating how bad it was, but I do remember there only, like, at the very least, every day, there only being, like, exactly one vegetarian option, and it always just seemed kind of ridiculous,” Hogan said. “I can’t think of anything that was like explicitly labeled as vegan or gluten-free.” 

Chen said proper nutrition is crucial for college students, especially for them to be successful in a learning environment.

“It can end up, again, as kind of like a holistic issue where both physical and mental are linked in such a way that poor nutrition makes everything worse,” Chen said. “You can’t function without a good meal. And sometimes when you’re a student, you don’t realize that you haven’t had a good meal in a while. And it kind of, you know, spirals.”