Spotlight Nov/Dec 2007 – Cafeteria Classrooms: Thinking Outside the High School Lunch Box

Thinking outside the box, in this case the high school lunch box, is necessary to respond to the many challenges facing school administrators, food service professionals and designers in today’s educational market.

Several of the challenges facing designers include demand for a healthier menu; demand for quality food by a consumer-driven student customer; demand for a tech-savvy campus; and pressure for greater access to school facilities before, during and after traditional class hours.

The entire design team, including school administrators, food service personnel, architects, interior designers and consultants should strive for a thorough understanding of the challenges as well as an understanding of the food product-delivery process, needs of the clients and trends of the student consumer.

Today’s school cafeteria food service design should examine and take into consideration four key aesthetic and functional elements.

1. Function and Flow: No More Assembly Lines

Changing attitudes in diet and nutrition are driving factors in changing how food is delivered. With a national emphasis on combating increasing numbers in childhood obesity and diabetes, school systems are shifting to healthier choices, control of portion size, and limiting the use of deep fryers.

Food service design can help make healthier choices more appealing to the student customer with innovative layout, display and lighting. Fruit and salad bars with cold/fresh offerings must be included along with the traditional heated foods.

Food courts, rather than the traditional buffet lines, provide multiple, specialized food stations, lending ease of access to particular foods for the student consumer. The physical layout of the food service area should be designed to move students quickly, giving them more time to enjoy the meal. Think of a design modeled after a mall food court.

Along with the mall food court concept, regimented seating with inflexible long tables cannot be exclusively used for this teenage environment. A more varied dining experience may include quiet areas for small groups, flexible seating arrangements for larger and perhaps more active groups, exterior seating in an adjacent outdoor courtyard, and open areas.

Rather than closed off with walls, the dining area can be open and become a social center for the campus.

There are two trends that no longer require return of a tray and silverware to the kitchen scullery, freeing the student from circulation congestion that occurs while returning items. One is the trend toward disposable plates, cups and utensils. The other, similar to a sandwich kiosk in an airport, is the “Grab and Go” trend that allows pre-prepared, pre-wrapped options that the student simply grabs rather than taking a returnable tray through a line.

2. Aesthetics and Quality: Student as Consumer

The teenage student today is a discriminating consumer, accustomed to making decisions on how and where to spend money, including whether to spend money at his/her school cafeteria.

The architect and school administrator should ask, “How does our school cafeteria appeal to today’s teen shopper?”

Presenting the food and the serving area in an appealing light becomes very important. Smartly placed lighting can be essential to helping create appeal. Graphics and signs, possibly themed, can provide an uplifting, entertaining effect to the overall space as well as provide functional directions. Color should be used and thoughtfully placed to emphasize points of interest. New LED and fiber optic technology replicates neon lighting and is a low maintenance, energy- efficient option for providing color and information.

3. Cyber Café: More than a Lunch Room

Today’s teenagers are media savvy and incredibly sophisticated when it comes to technology, often being the early adapters as new technology emerges.

A cafeteria can become the school’s Cyber Café in off periods, before and after the formal school day, as well as at lunch for students and teachers. Students can work together on now common assignments, such as creating a blog or podcast, conducting research on the Internet, or writing an essay on a laptop.

Technology does not have to be confined to the media center or a distance learning lab or library. With Wi-Fi and laptops, technology can be accessible throughout the school campus, including the cafeteria. The modern cafeteria-classroom will have outlets around the perimeter to connect laptops and should be open during free periods throughout the day.

In addition, protected flat panel displays for monitoring national news and school or community events can keep students and faculty informed on current events.

Since not every student has access to the Internet at home, schools can often be the primary provider for online access. School libraries tend to have more restricted use and are often not available to teens after hours. Today’s technologically enhanced cafeteria, with its extended hours and student-friendly atmosphere, is positioned to provide the student the educational empowerment that technology offers.

4. Location: Ease of Access

Experiments in how the school day is structured, changes in daily curriculum and added meal offerings — be it morning, noon or late afternoon — drive the change in the cafeteria from a backroom space to the frontline of school design innovation. The old kitchen and lunchroom, while traditionally one of the largest spaces in the school, was often hidden in the back of the campus to put distance between the classrooms and the smells and noises associated with the kitchen exhaust, deliveries and waste disposal.

Cafeterias used to be designed as either single-purpose spaces or dual-purpose spaces that were left empty much of the day. Today’s school systems, seeking the most from their budgets, use this relatively large space for additional centralized, accessible and flexible uses.

An energizing environment with a constant flow of today’s 21st century students, the cafeteria should be a multi-function space serving a variety of purposes, providing access to distance learning, connecting the student to Wi-Fi and other educational technology and becoming the place for after-school meetings. The cafeteria then becomes similar to a student union space.

Tackling these four compelling 21st century forces with new design direction propels the school cafeteria out of the lunch box and into the multi-functional space needed by the student and the school.

Bill Wallace, AIA, and Freddie Lynn Jr., AIA, are registered architects and executive vice president and vice president, respectively, of Goodwyn, Mills and Cawood.