Bye bye Albron

The university will be ending the contract with Albron  prematurely due to the caterer’s underperformance.

The opening of a real-life Starbucks coffee corner, the somewhat homemade prepared sandwiches and daily specials for only €3,75: Albron has definitely tried its hardest to provide its customers with better service. Unfortunately they did not do quite well enough for customers to award them with a score higher than a 6 – they received a 5,8 – the university is therefore forced to end the contract with Albron prematurely. The caterer declined to make a statement about the university’s decision.

Final date yet unknown
Both parties are still conferring about the final date of the university’s and caterer’s collaboration. “Of course, the contract won’t end immediately because our customers should still be able to eat and drink”, Michèle Belgraver of the Erasmus Facilitair Bedrijf (EFB) says. As soon as the final date for the contract with Albron is known, the EFB will submit a tender for a new European contract. This process could easily take over a year, but Belgraver is hesitant to  be more specific. Until then, Albron will continue to provide its services.

The university’s decision must have been a bitter pill to swallow for Albron as the scores from the 2012 customer satisfaction survey were better than those of the year before. Students appointed the restaurants with a 5,6 (one point higher than the year before). The staff, however, didn’t score higher than a 4,9 (versus a 4,4 the year before).

Products more positively assessed
According to students the foods and drinks in the restaurants have improved in quality, taste, variety, and appeal. Students were also far more positive about the bread rolls. In 2012 both staff members and students consumed more hot meals and assessed the temperature, quantity, taste, variation, options, and price of the meals more positively.

The hot meals remain a weak point
In spite of all, the hot meals remain the restaurant’s Achilles’ heel. A third of the students and half of the university’s staff members still find the quality of these meals to be very bad. The price/quality ratio of the products in both the restaurants and the coffee corners remain something which is hard to swallow for two-thirds of the customers. LJ

22 February 2013