This past weekend, the Evelyn Young Dining Hall implemented the first Caf Delivery Service.

This project has been in the works for two years and was designed to give “students… something that works and something that makes their lives easier… We hope that our system will create impacts for the campus and the community by making grabbing dinner on a busy night a little less stressful,” Senior Alli Orta said.

The profits created through this system will go to the Saint Peter Food Shelf, a center for food distribution for those in need.

“We have the potential to raise up to $500 for the Saint Peter Food Shelf,” Orta said.

The service was “built entirely for students by students,” Orta said.

“Our goal is to help more students get dinner and late-night snacks when they might not otherwise want to venture out, which improves their experience and promotes efficient use of the meal plans we pay for…We designed this for students who work at night, for students with a big exam on Monday [and] for students that have just a little too much fun on the weekends to go to the Caf,” Orta said.

Kevin Birr, Assistant Director of Dining Service Operations, and Steve Kjellgren, Associate Vice President of Auxiliary Services, and the whole staff partnered with the ENACTUS staff to “run the entire delivery process from ordering your food in the caf and getting it packaged, marking orders, driving delivery routes, and handling all consumer data, feedback, and processing,” Orta said.

The system was created to “provide what students wanted: a wide variety of popular foods at a decent delivery cost, and the ability to use their existing meal plan,” Orta said.

There were some initial roadblocks, like “being able to accept direct payment for the delivery and offering a huge variety of choices in our system [but] we just kept brainstorming… we sought out partnerships with the Caf and the Bookmark to get over hurdles we couldn’t do ourselves as a student organization, and we kept in touch with a ton of peers who contributed great thoughts, judgements, and support,” Orta said.

This system was developed with the intent to fix “high volumes of traffic in the caf at night and excess funds being left on student’s meal plans… We hope that as we see an increasing number of students using our delivery system, the caf will see shorter lines during those peak hours, making in- caf services faster and our delivery service as quick as we can make it,” Orta said.