Spoon University Creates Yelp for Campus Food

Editor’s Note: And earlier version of this article wrongly stated that Spoon University has 175 monthly unique page views. 

College students, like all consumers, care more and more about what they eat, and they want to have a say in their dining hall options. But unlike in restaurants, where diners can vote with their dollars, in campus dining students often lack a way to communicate their preferences and influence dining hall menus.

Empowering students to change campus food

To tackle this problem, Applegate challenge winning team Rumble came up with a“Yelp” platform for campus food. The website enables university students to provide feedback on their dining hall food directly to operators. While empowering students to have a voice in their dining experience, the platform also provides institutions with actionable analytics to help them make the most from student feedback.

Next Steps

The duo behind the hack, Sarah Adler and Mackenzie Barth, are cofounders of  Spoon University, the only food publication for college students, by college students. They are not actively developing of the project now, because they’re focused on growing their one-year-old startup. But if and when they choose to build out Rumble, they’ll already have a captive audience, to the tune of one thousand contributors and 250,000 monthly unique page views (and growing).

Needs

Sarah and Mackenzie say if and when they tackle Rumble head on, they’ll need an iOS developer to build out the front end and a back end developer to help them build the analytics system.  So if you’re a dev or data geek interested in making a difference in campus food and want to get involved, email nina[at]foodtechconnect[dot]com. 

In the spirit of Hack//Dining’s mission to drive open innovation, we hosted Google+ Hangouts with the winning teams. Our goal was to showcase their hacks and share their lessons learned and requests for resources and feedback.