At the University of Chester, your student voice is extremely important to us.
Check out the feedback from our Catering team in response to the comments you made concerning catering in our All-Student Survey in October 2023.
Queues in the Dining Room are too long
The Catering team work hard to ensure that queues are kept moving, however it is inevitable that an element of queueing will take place at times when the timetable includes a gap for large numbers of students over lunch time hours. We will take this feedback and conduct extra training with our team leaders to ensure this is monitored better during busy periods.
There aren’t enough staff in some Catering outlets
We are currently in the process of a recruitment drive which should help to speed up service.
There’s a lack of breakfast options
We’re pleased to offer a range of breakfast options at Exton Park. The Dining Room offers a full range of breakfast items including continental, hot breakfast muffins, cereals and fruit juices. We also offer Starbucks coffee from 8am. Stacked at Westminster also has a full breakfast menu, including sausage and bacon baps, pastries and tea and coffee. Binks Grab and Go serves breakfast paninis and pastries, including bacon turnovers and sausage rolls.
Customer service could be better
All our staff have received customer service training and this is refreshed every year. We currently hold a customer service excellence award which highlights our commitment to great customer service. If, however, we have fallen short of our usual high standards we will feed this back to the catering coordinators to ensure best practice is monitored and acted upon. We welcome all feedback about where we can do better especially pertaining to customer service and will ensure any complaints are thoroughly investigated and dealt with accordingly.
Food is too expensive
We review all our pricing every year – this includes all food, drinks and bar provisions, along with retail products. We try hard to price all our products in line with high street trends and also benchmark with other local universities to ensure we are competitive.
We currently offer a very cheap Value Meal at lunch times which is priced at £2.80. These meals include a variety of chef made meals that cover a broad range of nutritional and dietary standards.
There isn’t much variety on the menu
All our menus are designed around current food trends, factoring in a variety of nutritional, allergen and dietary needs and we endeavour to change our menus every term. We like to hold regular focus groups with students who may have issues surrounding the menus and take all this information into account when developing new ones. We also encourage students to regularly fill out comment cards and feedback to our team leaders and staff if any issues arise.
Lack of variety in the University shop
We are currently in a transition phase from one supplier to another. Following this transition, we should be able to tailor our product offer more towards student needs and use products best suited to and requested by our students.
More branded UoC items available to purchase
We are currently sourcing a new stationary supplier for use in the shop and are hoping to start selling a broad range of UoC branded items in the near future.
Bring back Binks Brasserie
Binks Brasserie was closed in summer 2023 to allow us to focus on our other Catering outlets on Exton Park, including the Dining Rooms, Stacked, Binks Grab and Go and the Union Bar.
The idea was to avoid replication across these four outlets and to improve focus on delivering quality and variety. The Dining Room was designed to be a dynamic and vibrant food hub, with various concepts each day offering a broad range of food and dietary requirements. We have worked hard to improve menus in these outlets and have factored in student focus groups and feedback, as well as current on trend foods.
We understand that this might not be to everybody’s tastes but we have encouraged students to give us as much feedback a possible throughout the year so we can ensure we are staying on point with our offerings. If the general consensus among the majority of students changes then we are in a good position to react to those changes quickly. Feedback can be given via comment cards or email – catering@chester.ac.uk
We would encourage students to try out all outlets including the Union Bar so they are fully aware of what’s on offer and experience the full range on offer.
Greater offer for students with allergies/Better knowledge from Catering staff concerning allergies
We have a very robust allergen policy where all staff are trained to provide accurate allergen advice to customers. All food and drinks created by our chefs and FOH team have allergens recorded on an allergen matrix which is customer facing.
Staff are well versed in being able to deal with any customer query involving allergens. If you have any specific dietary needs, please speak to a team leader and we will do our best to accommodate you.