In line with the new school year, Middlebury dining services have rolled out a suite of upgrades to the online menu service, Nutrislice. Key changes include granular nutritional information for food offerings, the ability to filter meals by allergens or specific dietary restrictions and meal schedules posted up to four weeks in advance.
As of this fall, each dining hall posts and updates a monthly schedule for upcoming meals on Nutrislice, giving students, especially those with allergies and dietary restrictions, greater ability to plan ahead for meals.
In an interview with The Campus, Dan Detora, executive director of food service operations, outlined how to best take advantage of the offerings.
By navigating to a specific dining hall on Nutrislice and going to the print button, students will be able to see and filter all upcoming meals for that specific dining hall over a four week period.
“You can do breakfast. You can do dinner. You can do all day. You can do it kind of any way you want,” Detora explained.
From this screen students can filter for dietary restrictions to give them a better sense of what meals, and which dining halls might be best for them in the weeks to come.
“If you say you're allergic to dairy and you're allergic to fish, and you apply that, it will go into the menu and it will cross out the items that you cannot have,” Detora said.
Students can access these options from the print options tab, where they can also filter the menu for nutritional information. For instance, students can select the “protein” tab and the menu will change to show the amount of protein in each serving of a meal. Similarly, students can filter the menu for only vegan, vegetarian, or halal offerings.
Theo Haythe ’28 thinks the changes will help him manage his nut allergy this upcoming year.
“Using the filtering option that I was shown will actually make a big difference when I plan out meals for the week and give me something to reference. I’m pretty excited about that feature,” he said in an interview with The Campus.
While every dining hall runs on the same four week menu cycle, each dining hall operates on different weeks, creating greater variety for students that Detora hopes students will better be able to take advantage of.
“All three dining halls have a different menu, so it's basically what we did. It's a four-week cycle, but they're running it at different times, so the variety is better for students. So you can say, ‘hey, you know, there's really nothing great on Monday, so I'll go over to Ross on Monday or whatever else,’” Detora said.
Another key change allows students to see specific nutritional information for the food they eat. By clicking on any dish on the online menus, a nutritional label, much like the ones on the back of any packaged food , will pop up with information about the specific macronutrients in the dish.
“Nutritional information was a big part of why we did this is because we haven't offered nutritional information for years, and it's been requested by students for a long time. So this is one of the major reasons why we did this, and we do the calculations ourselves,” Detora explained, highlighting how students could now better plan out how to better balance their diets and hit nutritional goals.
Although Middlebury does not employ a nutritionist like many other peer institutions, Detora says the calculations can be trusted by students.
“The source is from the USDA and ADA, the American Dietetics Association, and some other sites like that. But this will list everything similar to our old signs that have all the ingredients and the nutritional information to the best of our ability. Essentially, we do not have, unfortunately, a nutritionist or a dietitian … but we think it's pretty accurate for the most part,” Detora said.
Behind these changes is a small team that has labored over these new features for the past few years.
“We have a team of three individuals out here, along with all the chefs and the cooks helping us get through this. It has been a two-year painstaking process. We still have a ways to go, but we think it's finally coming together. I think the end product is awesome for students. It's way more than what we've ever provided in years past,” Detora explained.
His main hope, though, is that students take the time to use and enjoy these new features.
“We hope students get in there and kind of fool around a little bit,” Detora said.
Luke James Power '28 (he/him) is a News Editor.
Luke previously served as a contributing writer and as a news editor of "The Anvil" Middlesex school. He is majoring in economics and history. He is also a senior analyst with the Middlebury Student Investment Committee, and enjoys skiing, squash, and golf. He lives in Manhasset, NY.
