Dining hall smoothie bar expands into the cereal business
By Lauren Alpeyrie
Published on Thursday, September 27, 2007
Breakfast just got easier for Dartmouth students frustrated by the trials and tribulations of cereal making: Thayer Dining Hall's the Blend morphed into the Remix Wednesday, adding a cereal menu alongside its original smoothie offerings.
"Cereal's always been popular," said Dartmouth Dining Services Director Tucker Rossiter. "It's good comfort food."
DDS embraced the idea during its meetings this past summer. Inspired by Cereality -- a popular cereal restaurant chain where you can mix different brands of cereal, flavor your milk and add toppings -- the dining managers thought the idea might work well at Dartmouth. Cereality has locations at Arizona State University, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Pennsylvania.
"It's always important for us for DDS to implement new ideas," Rossiter said.
Rossiter explained that though the Blend smoothie bar has been popular since it was founded four years ago to alleviate the long smoothie lines in Collis Cafe, business had been waning as of late.
DDS originally planned to stop serving smoothies at the Blend to create space for the cereal bar, but Elizabeth Rosenberger, registered dietician and DDS manager, convinced them that she could make both work. Rosenberger helped DDS on the plans for Remix this summer.
"In negative-20 degrees Fahrenheit, nobody would want a smoothie," Rosenberger said. "[But] The Blend has enough of a following that the students would be upset if we got rid of it."
Rossiter said that a cereal bar may make its way into future renovations of Thayer and the planned Class of 1952 dining hall next to the McLaughlin Cluster.
He cautioned, however, that this is contingent on the cereal bar's success.
"We're in a design phase for the new Thayer, and we should incorporate [the cereal bar] then," Rossiter said. "We're closer to a new Thayer probably than we are to a [completely] new dining facility."
The Remix will have 20 kinds of cereal, as well as different toppings, milk and weekly specials, much like Cereality. It will be open 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., Monday through Friday, though the times might change depending on whether the trial phase is successful.
"Let's see how popular cereal is with a Dartmouth student," Rossiter said.