Chartwells Educational Dining Services/Compass Group

When it comes to voicing their opinions, young people tend not to hem and haw about what they like to eat. “Students aren’t shy,” says Dean Lowden, corporate executive chef for Chartwells Educational Dining Services, an operating company of Compass Group, North American Division. “They say exactly what’s on their minds, and we wanted that.”

Dean Lowden, corporate executive chef for Chartwells Educational Dining Services, helped create the Terra Ve vegetarian & vegan program in response to student feedback. Caribbean vegetable stew, is one of the dishes featured in the program.

That type of blunt feedback led to the development of Terra Ve, a comprehensive program of vegetarian and vegan dishes that Chartwells began introducing to more than 200 colleges and universities last summer.

At the University of Miami, where the program debuted, Chris Cleveland, the school’s senior director for dining services, says: “A lot of people had been asking for this, so I’m glad it came. It’s doing very well.”

Approximately 7 percent of the students at Miami are vegetarian. Although the university always has served vegetarian items, Terra Ve is located in a separate station, which has enhanced its appeal. The menu is available for lunch and dinner seven days a week. In the university’s two dining halls, between 200 and 225 Terra Ve lunches are served per meal period and between 300 and 325 dinners per meal period.

Cleveland says the difference between being vegan and vegetarian is that vegans eat strictly vegetables, while vegetarians are more flexible and, for example, may eat such items as macaroni and cheese. Vegans also may consume grains; they avoid all foods with any component derived directly or indirectly from an animal.

Creating a program flexible enough to fit the students’ needs probably was the biggest challenge for Lowden and his team of regional chefs. The Terra Ve plan, which took two years to develop, was validated by a National Restaurant Association study indicating that 20 to 30 percent of diners are interested in vegetarian dishes. It also stated that 15 percent of college students select vegetarian options every day.

Terra Ve’s menu showcases such items as soups, like Asian velvet corn, pumpkin corn chowder, okra gumbo and tortilla soup.

Entrées include acorn squash stuffed with millet, lentils and tofu, not so sloppy joe’s, and rye grit polenta cakes with roasted root vegetables.

Side dishes include bulgur wheat with garbanzo beans and roasted garlic, chipotle mashed potatoes, Honolulu beans and orzo vegetable salad.

Special salad dressings, sauces, relishes and condiments also are included as well as sandwiches, wraps, pizzas and desserts.

According to Lowden, it wasn’t easy pulling the program together and getting it launched. “One of our major challenges was training our personnel, our associates and our chefs in vegetarianism,” he says. “It was very cloudy, even for me. I learned a lot about grains and soy products through this program.”

Another tough one for Lowden was tracking down products. “It was and still is a hurdle,” he says. “We work on it daily and finally have located different vendors that have high-quality vegetarian products.

“We’ve gotten a lot of satisfaction watching this grow from nothing to a full-blown program implemented into the schools,” he adds. “That’s very exciting.”

Brigit Silvestri, creative development director for Compass Group, North America, says, “We believe Terra Ve will have broad appeal as an alternative to the daily standard fare.”

With Terra Ve on a roll, don’t look for it to end anytime soon. “It’s continual,” Lowden notes. “We’re going to keep building and adding to it. As the needs of students keep evolving, we have to stay in tune.”

For Lowden, the MenuMasters award for Best On-Site Menu means: “Our hard work has paid off. We’re very pumped up about this honor.”

Lowden, from his office in Ryebrook, N.Y., is in the midst of creating a network of chefs. “We are actually implementing it right now,” he says. “It will basically be regional chefs who will provide me with input on what works in the field, what our clients are looking for and what the needs of the operators are.”

When Lowden creates a program, the chef network then can test it at their locations and get student and faculty feedback.

Under educational dining services, Chartwells has a school division and a higher-education division. Lowden supports both but primarily works in higher education. That group is broken down into six regions with six vice presidents, one for each region.

Every year Lowden conducts six individual summer meetings for training and introducing new programs. “Obviously, Terra Ve was one of the key programs we rolled out last year,” he says, “and the response has been great.”

Lowden has been with Compass Group for 11 years, the last three with Chartwells. He graduated from The Culinary Institute of America in 1982, then worked at a conference center, at several fine-dining restaurants and as executive chef for a country club.

In 1990 he joined Flik International, which Compass Group acquired in the mid-1990s. His switch to corporate life, he says, came at a perfect time.

“I started with Flik in 1990, and my first child was born in 1991,” he says. “I was working six to seven days a week with split shifts, so I never got to see my family. I know it’s not unique, and every chef does it, but this is a better life for me.”