EPFL's new food truck village
© 2021 EPFL - RESCO - A. Herzog
At EPFL, we’re in the process of revamping our food services in order to provide more sustainable options that are based on local, seasonable produce.
Now that we’ve selected the new service providers for our restaurants, we have issued a request for proposals for a new food truck village we plan to set up on the Lausanne campus. This stems from a legal requirement, but we also see it as an opportunity to improve our food truck offering. However, some members of the EPFL community are concerned that some of their favorite food trucks will disappear and have launched a petition to keep them.
We would like to reassure the EPFL community. We intend to maintain a variety of food trucks on our campus. Our selection process will follow a well-defined procedure that provides for the fair treatment of all bidders. The process is being overseen by an eight-person committee whose members include student representatives (from Unipoly and AGEPoly). The deadline for submitting bids is 9 August, and in early May, over 30 independent food truck operators – including NAS and Thai, which are listed in the petition – visited the planned site for the village.
The selected food trucks will begin operating on campus on 3 January 2022.
They will round out our existing food-services offering, which includes:
- The Native, Ginko, Alpine and Esplanade restaurants operated bySV-Group
- The Hopper, Niki, Zaha, Giacometti and Piano restaurants operated by Compass Group
- The Copernic, Cyber Café, Ornithorynque, Arcadie and Epicure restaurants operated by Novæ Restauration
- Restaurants at the Rolex Learning Center and the Microcity campus in Neuchâtel, for which the RFP is still underway
- LOcalomat vending machines (offering local, seasonal products) operated by Vaud+
- Selecta : vending machines
With our new lineup of eating options, we look forward to providing you with even more healthy, fresh and sustainable food choices.
Bruno Rossignol, head of RESCO