Cal Poly Campus Dining announced a new dining plan for faculty and staff that can be purchased for $350 through their Cal Poly Portal.
With the faculty and staff dining membership, members will get $400 in dining dollars that can be used through GrubHub or PolyCard at any of the Campus Dining venues, including the food trucks, according to Director of Campus Dining Jess Dozier.
Members also get exclusive benefits like hot drip coffee at Julian’s for one cent on Wednesdays through the Penny Pick-Me-Up program and discounts for Cal Poly Arts, the Mustang Shop, Cal Poly Print and Copy and Conference and Event Planning through June, according to the Campus Dining website.
“The faculty and staff plan is structured very similarly to the benefits in the community meal plans, the Campus Partner benefits are simple bonuses,” Dozier wrote in an email to Mustang News. “The Cal Poly Arts bonus is almost as good as the student discount.”
Dozier did not answer why these discounts expire in June, but he said they are working on creating another plan for faculty and staff for next year.
“We haven’t worked out the details yet but we will take what we learned this quarter and create a new membership option,” Dozier wrote in the email.
For faculty and staff, dining dollars roll over quarter to quarter and into the next year without the purchase of a new plan. Student dining plans require students to make a minimum purchase of $275 for a new dining plan allowing the leftover dining dollars to roll over from the current year.
Dozier said students need to purchase a new dining plan for their dining dollars to roll over because students have higher rates of food insecurity and purchasing another plan would give them a larger balance going into the next year.
“Food insecurity increases for students as they move off the first-year dining plan, and that was the impetus behind the rollover option,” Dozier wrote in an email to Mustang News. “The ability to roll dining dollars over year to year is a unique option in college dining that Cal Poly and very few others offer.”
With the recent opening of 1901 Marketplace, Dozier said he hopes this new faculty and staff dining plan will help bring the entire campus community together.
“The goal with these plans is to help faculty and staff re-engage with dining and the student community in a common space such as 1901,” Dozier wrote.
Faculty and staff will also have access to a private dining area located next to 1901 Marketplace called the Cal Poly Partners Pavillon which opened on Monday, according to the Cal Poly Report.
The Pavilion, which will be open Tuesday through Thursday 11 a.m. – 2 p.m., provides a “quiet space to eat and relax among colleagues and peers,” the report said.
Sarah Hegg, the Center for Engineering, Science and Mathematics Education grants program manager, said she thinks the space is great. Hegg and her colleagues said they just “stumbled upon” the Pavilion and thought it would be a good place to have lunch and talk.
“It’s nice to have a space that’s quieter than the student spaces,” Hegg said.
More information about the faculty and staff dining membership can be found on the Campus Dining website.