After opening last summer, the Spirit Bear Coffee kiosk on UFV’s CEP campus in Chilliwack has been shut down.
“Dana [Hospitality] came to us to see if they could close down because people weren’t using it,” said director of ancillary services Cameron Roy. “It’s the inevitability of the finances, the business model, but we will provide a solution for the Chilliwack students.”
Dana Hospitality took over as UFV’s food services provider on August 2 after the previous contract with Sodexo expired, and this semester marks their second at the university. To compensate for the decrease in services at the CEP campus, the Tim Horton’s will be expanded to include a Fast and Fresh program, increasing the amount of fresh food available, as well as an espresso whole bean coffee system.
Although Spirit Bear Coffee will no longer be offered at the CEP campus, Roy noted that plans to open a kiosk on the Abbotsford campus are still in place. The coffee shop will be running out of the current Road Runner Café space, which will be renovated over the summer with the tentative opening planned for the fall semester.
“We’re going to transition it over to Abbotsford and build,” said Roy. “We’re not losing the brand, we’re bringing them in, expanding it.”
The renovations will include turning the area into more of a student-friendly study space, including aboriginal art commissioned by Spirit Bear Coffee, which is Vancouver-based and aboriginally owned and operated.
“Students are staying on campus more and more, and we want to cater to that, we want to make sure there’s services here that make their stay on campus, the experience, that much better,” Roy said. “We want to make sure it’s there and it’s comfortable, just a real gathering place.”
As for the former kiosk on the CEP campus, Roy noted that current plans include for food services to utilize the space for catering.
“We still want to run catering on the Chilliwack campus,” he said. “We have events going on there all the time and that’s a perfect spot to keep so that we can manage that area as well.”
Since its transition at the end of summer, Roy has already received positive feedback from students on the services provided by Dana Hospitality.
“The feedback that I get from students is immediate, because you mess with someone’s food it’s a very controversial issue,” he said. “If you get food services right on campus, you’re a hero, but if you don’t you’re scrambling to compensate. Dana has done such a wonderful job of responding to what we need, what the university needs, what the student population has been asking for.”
