Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind., serves 24,000 meals a day in their dining facilities. With that amount of volume, hundreds of thousands disposable products would be contributed to landfills over time. In an effort to become more sustainable, Executive Director of Indiana University Dining Rahul Shrivastav made it a goal to convert all their foodservice areas from disposable plates to reusable dishes.

“To move dishes around, there’s no better dish caddy than Cambro’s flexible dish caddies. They can take any form and any shape. I can go pick a plate and all I have to do is call my rep and say I need something for this plate to fit and Cambro finds it for me,” said Shrivastav.

After they purchased thousands of pieces of chinaware, Shrivastav purchased 62 Compact Adjustable Dish Caddies to transport them to each dining station and hundreds of Camracks® to clean and hold them when they aren’t in use.

“[My local Cambro rep] did a great job of finding all the stuff that I needed and in no time found out what I needed from her for that. It actually accomplished that goal of reusable and you know sustainability starts working when there’s a bottom line impact. Because every time you buy a disposable dish or you buy a disposable product, people eat on it, but they throw it away and Cambro makes that much, much easier for us to wash, reuse, and make that resource reusable. It’s a product that pays for itself in the future,” said Shrivastav.

Every station in their dining court uses a different kind of plate, which is why it was so important for Shrivastav to find a dish caddy that could fit multiple sizes.

“We’ve got about 12 stations in our dining court, so you can imagine that 12 different kinds of plates are being used all across the place. It was very important that [our dish caddy] was flexible, and it served its purpose in that area,” said Shrivastav.

“This generation is conscious of what is happening with the environment. Once we make that change, that works for them. So, I think that the Cambro products have played a major part in making that change.”

In addition to chinaware, Shrivastav purchased Huntington® Tumblers in lieu of disposable cups. When asked what made him choose the Cambro tumblers over his other options, Shrivastav said his decision was very simple.

“The Cambro name brand, it’s very dependable. I could use a different tumbler, but I know the quality will fade away. I’ve seen Cambro tumblers and the quality doesn’t fade away. Six months in, they still look new and they’ve had extensive use,” said Shrivastav.

In addition to reusability, Shrivastav wanted a tumbler that would be easy for students to grab and quickly get their beverages.

“The tumblers have the grooves in them and they stack really amazing. It’s not stacking on top of each other, forcing one into the other and it gets stuck. We have 3 drink stations where we serve about 5,000 students a day. We’ve got to have 5,000 glasses between that and something that does not stack well, we wouldn’t be able to serve that many students efficiently,” said Shrivastav.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: ADRIANA DESIDERIO IS THE DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER AT CAMBRO.