Purdue University has joined the list of early adopting campuses to deploy autonomous delivery robots from Starship Technologies. The unmanned delivery robots are equipped with GPS and geofencing technology and can navigate college campuses to deliver food and beverage orders to students.

After a long partnership with mobile ordering provider, Tapingo, Texas State University is set to continue providing mobile ordering to its students through Grubhub. The new partnership with Grubhub, who purchased Tapingo in 2018, is expected to offer many of the same features as before along with improved delivery benefits.

Minnesota’s St. Thomas University has installed touchless biometric hand scanners that students will now use to gain entry to campus dining halls instead of their ID cards. The initiative will leverage IDEMIA’s MorphoWave biometric readers, and will see all members of the campus community with meal plans be enrolled in the system.

Food service and facilities management provider, Aramark, has acquired the privately-held Good Uncle — an app-based, on-demand food delivery service. The deal will see Good Uncle’s “freshly prepared, restaurant quality meals” delivered to popular pick-up points around college campuses.

Cornell University has announced an agreement that will see the university help nearby Ithaca College transition to offering in-house dining operations to its students. Cornell Dining will lead the consulting and training partnership — which was agreed in late June — as part of a project that will provide Ithaca College’s 4,000 students with campus meal plans in time for the start of the fall semester in August.

Georgia Southern University’s Eagle Dining Services is using a new mobile ordering app called GATA-Go to support food and beverage orders for its campus community. The GATA-Go app is being offered through card system vendor, Transact, and will offer a similarly convenient means for students, faculty and staff to place orders from their smartphones at on-campus retail dining locations.

When it comes to campus dining, more universities are looking to self-service kiosk solutions underpinned by the campus card system as a means to offer students greater flexibility and convenience. Discussing this topic in greater detail, CBORD is hosting a free webinar dedicated to self-service options for campus dining, with the University at Buffalo presenting its experiences with self-service ordering in a medical school environment.

Pennsylvania’s Bloomsburg University has long been using its leftover dining funds to stock the shelves of the local food pantry, and donates more than a ton of food and thousands of dollars in meal-plan funds each year. And a more unique use of the donations, is in the Bloomsburg Food Cup­board’s bagging of breakfast, lunch and snacks for elementary students from under privileged families to take home each weekend.

It’s indisputable that mobile apps are redefining the way students interact with the college campus. With more utilities being added seemingly by the day, a recent in the University of Arizona’s student publication, The Daily Wildcat, listed seven mobile applications that are must-haves for first-year students.

Food insecurity is a growing issue for students across the country, leading to meal-donation programs popping up on campuses across the country. But the University of California, Merced’s iCare meal donation program has set the bar particularly high both in terms of the service it provides and how the system has been implemented.