Behind the Scenes at Bruin Plate and Covel

By Alison Chi

This week, we met up with the Associate Director of UCLA Dining Charles Wilcots. He gave us a tour of Bruin Plate and Covel, showing us the food processors at each dining hall. We went in at gave us a tour of Bruin Plate and Covel, showing us the food processors at each dining hall. We went in at 4pm so we saw a lot of the staff members preparing for that night’s dinner. Charles also showed us the inside of the Bruin Plate’s large refrigerator which has buckets of potatoes. We met a lot of the dining staff and we learned that at Bruin Plate, a majority of the food wasted by students is fruit and self-serve vegetables, which really surprised us.

The dining staff also took us to the loading dock, which is where they separate trash, compost, and recycling.After the tour of the dining halls, we had a brief meeting with Charles and our stakeholder Emma, sharing our potential projects for the quarter. Charles really liked our plan to conduct surveys, especially our idea to clear people’s plates as incentive to take the survey. During our group meeting, we definitely had a better direction of where we want to go with our project than we have in prior weeks. Charles also mentioned that education is an important part of both educating consumers and the staff members. We will be working on our survey questions this week so that we can start gathering information on demographics. After the tour of the dining halls, we had a brief meeting with Charles and our stakeholder Emma, sharing our potential projects for the quarter. Charles really liked our plan to conduct surveys. He also mentioned that education is an important part of both educating consumers and the staff members. We will be working on our survey questions this week so that we can start gathering information on demographics.