By Theresa Schliep 

While students can temporarily count on drinking Sodexo coffee with their Sodexo pancakes and sausage for breakfast, the Fordham community cannot count on eating the same food next fall semester.

Fordham University’s culinary, catering and nutritional services contract with Sodexo is to continue to provide dining services to both Rose Hill and Lincoln Center campuses and will not participate in interviews nor answer questions until the bidding process is completed, per information provided by John Azzopardi, the resident district manager at Rose Hill.

Fordham issued a Request for Proposals, (RFP), on Friday, Dec. 4, 2015. Since Fordham released the RFP to the community, no information has been provided by the university, Sodexo or any of its representatives.

Emails for comments to Corina Tse, GSB ’16 and President of the Student Culinary Council John Burns, Catering Manager Bill Haag, Purchasing Manager and Deming Yaun, university contract liaison, were unable to comment at this time.
Sodexo also prohibits employees from answering any questions.
Sodexo has provided culinary, catering and nutritional services to Fordham for the past thirty years, despite multiple controversies regarding its contracts.

In March of 2011, the Student Deli at Fordham received a letter grade of a C for live roaches and unsanitized food preparation surfaces. New York City health inspectors closed two other Rose Hill dining services for violations.

Consequently, in 2012, the Princeton Review ranked Fordham’s food as the national worst. In 2013, the Princeton Review ranked it fifth worst, and in 2014, seventh worse. It stayed at seventh worst in 2015 but improved to thirteenth worst in the Princeton Review’s 2016 rankings.

As a result of the controversies surrounding Sodexo’s culinary services, in 2013, the university stipulated that they would maintain their contract with Sodexo but Sodexo would incur three million dollars in fines if Fordham did not improve in rankings within the next few years. It is not clear if or when Sodexo will pay those fines.
In early december, a petition demanding that Fordham University become “Sodexo-Free” began circulating on the internet.

In an email in response to questions regarding the contract, Azzopardi claimed that many of the allegations stated in the aforementioned petition are “not factually accurate.” The petition claimed that there are documented cases of Sodexo serving horse meat as “beef” in England. Azzopardi said that “Sodexo operations in the U.S. do not source beef products from Europe; moreover, all of our raw and frozen ground beef products are sourced domestically.”

The petition highlights a cancellation of a $1.2 billion contract between the U.S. Marine Corps and Sodexo. Azzopardi said, “We continue to operate mess hall contracts on both the East and West Coasts and have done so since the beginning of our contract in 2003.” It appears, that after controversy surrounding Sodexo’s working conditions, the U.S. Marine Corps did in fact lose a $764 million deal for operations on the west coast of the United States in February of 2011 until August 2011, when the caterer announced it was selected for a seventh year, $766 million contract to cater 20 mess halls on the west coast, according to the company itself.

Azzopardi, however, did not respond to the referenced University of Michigan study linking private food management and poor testing scores.

Similarly, Simon’s Deli, a local business on Arthur Ave that has provided food for Fordham students since March 2007, has made a petition for students to support a potential Simon’s Deli operation on campus. The petition, published on Dec. 4, 2015, claims that if Fordham allows a deli to open on campus, 10 percent of profits will go to Fordham Athletics.