Dining Services has decided to implement new meal plans starting in the fall of 2014.

After seven years of the same meal plans, dining services thought they would listen to students feedback to help make students dining experience more comfortable.

“Some of the feedback we got was the lack of flexibility, somewhat restricts that students feel like they have. So what we’ve done is introduce four new meal plans,” said Bridgett Stapleton, Resident District Manager of Aramark.

There is the freshman 7-day all access plan that comes with 100 dollars in dining dollars. Its main purpose is to give freshmen freedom to eat without worrying about running out meals.

The 200 and 100 block plans have 200 meals with 500 dining dollars, and 100 meals with 1000 dining dollars, respectively. Dining Services believe that these new plans will benefit students that live further away from Commons.

Finally, the 5 day all-access plan, which has 400 dining dollars, allows students the chance to pick five days of the week that they feel like they would need to visit the Commons.

A student’s five days will reset every Thursday, so if a student knows their schedule prior, they can easily plan what days they could go to Commons.

Stapleton said the 5-day plan was originally going to be the weekdays, but then, “People pushed back and said, ‘No! What if I go home on Thursday and I’m back on Sunday? Then I wasted my meal access on Friday and I’ll be back on campus Sunday and I can’t use it.”

All plans will restart each semester and the plans come with five guest meals per semester.

Also, Dining Services plan to remove meal equivalencies from Gengras Student Union and Hawk’s Nest. However, the prices for these new meal plans have not been released yet.

Once they are implemented, Dining Services will be listen to student feedback about their reactions to the new changes, and continue to work on it to make sure they offer the best options for meal plans.