The Housing and Dining Sustainability (H&DS) team at UC Berkeley is focused on improving the sustainable dining options available to the thousands of students who eat every day at UC Berkeley, while shaping a more just, equitable, and localized food system in California. Under manager Shannen Casey, students are empowered to directly improve institutional practices. As part of the University of California Office of the President’s Sustainable Practices Policy, UC campuses are striving to procure 25% of dining purchases from sustainable sources by 2030. For UC Berkeley, this means that one quarter of dining spend will be on products that have been certified with standards like Organic, Fair Trade, Certified Humane, and dozens of others approved by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE)
Shannen Casey (L) and Celeste Basken (R) stand with a poster describing the tools and related data.
In the summer of 2024, two student coordinators in H&DS, Victoria Quach and Celeste Basken, began a thorough review of Berkeley Dining’s purchasing. This included auditing over $18 million of products to determine their certifications and sustainability. Through this process, H&DS coordinators realized the knowledge and expertise they were acquiring was highly valuable and could benefit other universities and institutions across the country. Quach and Basken turned their experience into a 50-page educational toolkit, aimed at equipping sustainability professionals and students with the resources to conduct audits of their own institutional procurement practices. They shared this resource at the 2025 AASHE conference and trained student fellows from across the UC in several convenings and meetings. Additionally, Basken continued to develop resources to assist campuses with sustainability reporting by creating a sustainability auto-reporting tool. The tool compares a campus’ purchase order against items previously reported as sustainable by the UC campuses.
Basken also created an interactive procurement dashboard, aimed at enabling procurement managers, chefs, and other stakeholders to discover new sustainable products. This resource features purchasing data from 10 UC campuses, including over 1,600 sustainable products. For each campus, the tool specifically recommends products from distributors that they already purchase from, in order to facilitate easier onboarding.
Trends and insights
As the student coordinators from H&DS worked to improve sustainable procurement and train campuses in reporting, they observed that price concerns were often the chief barrier for procurement and dining teams in adopting new purchasing practices. Basken and Casey created a new menu design approach called Menu Frequency Optimization, using the Berkeley Dining menus from the 2025-26 academic year. The goal of menu frequency optimization was to adjust the frequency with which Dining Menus serve certain items, such as beef, in order to “free up” extra money to spend on more sustainable versions of comparable items, such as chicken.
Menu Frequency optimization functions using linear optimization in the data science program R; however, it is not too complicated conceptually. By systematically making “smart swaps” of items like conventional beef for Certified Humane chicken, the tool allows Berkeley Dining to reduce or maintain costs, cut greenhouse gas emissions, and increase spend on certified sustainable items.
To understand Menu Frequency, we can use a hypothetical: for instance, Berkeley Dining might serve beef three times a week, and chicken four times a week (Fig. 1A). In this hypothetical scenario, one third of the beef has sustainable certifications, along with half of the chicken. Suppose, as well, that there is a price premium on both sustainable beef and sustainable chicken options.
Figure 1A-B. Hypothetical (simplified) menu frequency optimization example.
If Dining wants to increase its sustainable percentage of spend, it cannot swap beef or chicken for the sustainable option without increasing overall costs. However, by adjusting the frequency, it can achieve this goal (Fig. 1B). This is possible because beef costs more than chicken, even sustainable chicken. Since beef also is also associated with more greenhouse gasses, the optimized menu will maintain costs, increase sustainable percentage of spend, and cut greenhouse gasses.
Making sustainability easy
For an expert in sustainability or a dining manager familiar with the prices of their procurement, this simple type of optimization does not require a full-blown data analysis. The benefit of the Menu Frequency dashboard is that dining teams can simultaneously optimize across dozens of specific cuts of meat, which may each include a sustainable and conventional price–a task that is very difficult to do manually. Moreover, menu frequency also incorporates the average portion size of each cut of meat, by referencing the recipes it is used in, which affects the real cost of the switch. The menu frequency dashboard allows stakeholders to adjust the percentage of change from a given menu to the optimized version, to allow chefs to maintain comparable menus with only small, high-impact adjustments. Menu frequency can determine the largest cost savings possible without reducing sustainable percentage of spend, the largest increase in sustainable spend possible without increasing cost, and the exact change in sustainable spend possible at a given cost reduction target.
Using this tool, chefs and leadership in Berkeley Dining shifted menus for the Fall 2026 semester. They received exact menu recommendations, since menu frequency links the specific meat cuts to the recipes in which it is featured.
Continuing with the optimization approach, Basken analyzed the data from ten UC campuses to produce dining-wide recommendations about how to adjust dining spend on sustainability to meet institutional goals. These Campus Roadmaps help stakeholders understand the categories for which a targeted investment in sustainability is most effective. The goals– reduce or maintain costs while increasing sustainable percentage of spend– are the same as in Menu Frequency optimizations. This tool analyzes product-level purchasing to provide generic roadmaps for sustainability. Together, these resources serve to empower the UC to align institutional purchasing with environmental and economic sustainability.