Students living in fully catered residential communities on-campus at UNSW Sydney will have more opportunities to enjoy a hot and nutritious meal while juggling their busy academic and social schedules this year, thanks to an innovative pilot of high-tech thermal food lockers launched this week.
With more than 600+ students from The Kensington Colleges, Fig Tree Hall, UNSW Hall and International House dining at Goldstein Hall each day, mealtimes can be a little chaotic. Thermal lockers and the technology infrastructure from Australian start-up Foodifox will now enable students unable to eat at the designated lunch or dinner times to access hot and fresh meals outside of core dining hours.
Located at the entrance of the main dining hall where students enjoy more than 1000+ meals a day, the locker unit consists of 17 individually heated cubicles designed to keep food safe, secure, and hot.
Improving food experience with heat and hygiene
The pilot – the first of its kind in the Australian education sector – was initiated by corporate caterer Catering Project, to help improve the dining, and overall university experience for students at UNSW. Catering Project and UNSW wanted to improve the food experience for students who would previously have to locate and reheat their allocated meals from a refrigerator, often leading to meal mix-ups.
To help avoid this issue, integration with the University’s existing online ordering and cashless payments partner My School Connect means students will now be able to place requests for late lunches and late dinners through the My School Connect app.
Once the request is made, the student will be assigned a locker cubicle where Catering Project will place the meal ready for collection. The heated cubicle will keep the meal hot until collected by the student. For added peace of mind, the Foodifox lockers are fitted with UV self-cleaning technology to ensure that all lockers are hygienic ready for the next meal service.
Foodifox’s mission is to ease the pain points associated with food delivery in high-rise residential buildings, education institutions and corporate workplaces through the solution that allows drivers and caterers to deliver food straight to an allocated locker, where users can simply unlock it with their phones. The UNSW pilot marks Foodifox’s first location within NSW.
Re-fuelling minds – and bodies
Hungry students can collect a meal by scanning a unique QR code on their phone to open a secure cubicle and give them access to a hot meal.
For Catering Project Executive Chef Dominique Heitz, the innovative offering helps his own team’s service deliver an improved dining experience.
“The best meals are served hot, fresh and right when you’re ready to enjoy them. We’re thrilled that more UNSW students will be able to enjoy the high-quality food experience provided by UNSW through our lockers,” says Tim Pagram, Foodifox Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder.
“The integration with My School Connect and Catering Project, is a strong demonstration of the highly flexible and scalable ‘Self-Serve’ platform we have built at Foodifox to solve the food delivery and collection challenges at high-volume catering, residential and corporate locations around Australia.”
The main dining hall is a vibrant hub of activity “and an important opportunity for our students to build social connections while re-fuelling their minds and bodies between studies”, says Luke Jones UNSW Sydney, Operations, Office of the Pro Vice-Chancellor, Education & Student Experience.
“But we understand that students have increasingly busy academic and social lives, so this pilot will provide more opportunities for those students to enjoy the wonderful nutritious food provided to all students living on campus, in an innovative and convenient way.”
