College of the Holy Cross

Rich Perna

In today’s world, our students and communities expect great food and convenience with their busy schedules.  

Before the advent of mobile ordering, we often faced the challenge of handling big rushes as classes would break.  This led to long lines, wait timesand immense pressure on our staff. The rushes also affected the consistency of our products and limited our capabilities.  However, with mobile ordering, the experience has significantly improved for both our staff and our customers.  

I’ll be the first to admit that I was leary of mobile ordering many years ago when it all began. How would it be managed and affect the staff in a high-volume retail setting on a college campus? At the College of the Holy Cross, we have been using GrubHub for many years. Currently, nearly 100 percent of our students and a large portion of our faculty and staff use it daily, which has increased our mobile orders to an average of 5,000 per day.

In January, we started moving everyone towards mobile only via the GrubHub app. As a second option, you can use the sleek GrubHub Kiosks in two of our locations. Both locations have doubled the volume and made it much more efficient for the staff and customers. Due to the success, we will turn another location into mobile ordering only this fall. It is phenomenal to have something ready for our busy community as they walk through the door instead of waiting in line. 

“If you’re not leveraging mobile ordering to its full potential, you are missing out big-time.”

It's really hard to believe that not long ago, at one of our busiest locations, everyone wrote down what they wanted with paper and pencil. The customer would hand the order off to the cashier, who had to punch everything in and swipe the card. This alone limited many students who couldn’t frequent the space due to the time it took to prepare the food.  That alone takes a minimum of two minutes. Ordering via mobile allows you to control when you want itand it’s set up to print the order for the staff to either stick to the cup or put next to the items prepared. Best of all, it’s all paid for.

We often consider how mobile ordering could impact all-you-care-to-eat residential dining, but it's completely different from retail spaces and much more complicated. Our wheels are spinning on this topic as we aim to navigate the benefits.

It’s fair to say that most food service establishments use some kind of mobile ordering, but are they using it to its fullest potential by turning some locations into mobile-only locations and using kiosks for customers who may not use the phone app?

As you can see, we can’t say enough great things about mobile ordering using the GrubHub platform and what it has done for our community.  Next fall, we will introduce mobile ordering within our athletic concessions, eventually delivering to your seat while you watch a game. 

If you’re not leveraging mobile ordering to its full potential, you are missing out big-time.