Northland College has revised its academic programs as of Fall 2024. Some pages may refer to previous programs while updates are made to reflect our refocused offerings.

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Campus Dining

Let’s eat.

We collaborate with Chartwells Higher Ed to create a sustainable dining experience for you.

Moving way beyond banning plastic straws, we incorporate tray-less dining to reduce food waste and divert food scraps from the landfill through our campus compost initiative. We have fostered partnerships with our regional farmers and food producers.

With a commitment to real foods, Chartwells purchases meat, produce, and dry goods from our regional farmers, businesses, and the campus garden crew. The College has signed the Real Food Challenge and adopted the Real Food Standards—valuing humane treatment of animals, organic, fair labor standards, and local as a metric for evaluating the food we purchase.

Here are some of the ways you can interact with our food system:

Join the student-initiated Northland chapter of the Food Recovery Network, collecting leftover food slated for the compost bin, packing it, and delivering it to a regional food bank.
Get a job with the garden crew managing the campus gardens—from planting, weeding, and caring for the seedlings to harvest and market.
Work with the Hulings Rice Food Center’s compost crew to gather food waste from the dining hall and around campus to take to our compost partner, where it turns to soil that can be used by local farmers and gardeners.
Help with packing out the garden harvest for students to enjoy on the trail during our Outdoor Orientation trips each August.

See What’s On the Menu

Chartwells, Northland College’s food service provider, offers a variety of creative meal options. Our dining hall, Baldwin Commons, is located in the Ponzio Campus Center. Dining is buffet style, meaning you choose what and how much you want. Here’s a sampling of our daily food choices:

Hearthstone Ovens: specialty pizzas, made-to-order pasta, or deli made with a variety of breads or wraps.
The Grill: Hamburgers, cheeseburgers, chicken sandwiches, and french fries.
Fresh Market: Homemade soups and our fresh salad bar, stocked with local veggies and fermented foods.
The Kitchen: Designed especially for vegetarian and vegans. Prepared from scratch daily.

And of course, we also have a great selection of beverages, desserts, cereals, breakfast breads, fruits, and vegetables to round out your meals. For dining hall hours, visit dineoncampus.com/northland.

For specials and upcoming events, visit the Chartwells dining guide. You can also contact Chartwells.

The Campus Store, also located in the Ponzio Campus Center, offers made-to-order dining options, plus a selection of salads, sandwiches, and snacks to go. It’s the perfect spot to grab a drink and a bite to eat between classes. The Campus Store also offers a selection of grocery items, school supplies, and Northland apparel.

Meal Plan Pricing

All students living on campus at Northland College are required to have the Full Plan, which allows unlimited access to meals in the Baldwin Commons dining facility during open hours. Baldwin Commons serves three meals each weekday when classes are in session, and brunch and dinner are served on weekends.

In addition to Northland apparel, the Campus Store offers a variety of snacks, beverages, ready-made sandwiches, and more. Students on the Full Plan may access a to-go meal at the Campus Store once per day at no additional cost. (Additional details and limitations may apply—see the Campus Store for more information.)

The Full Plan comes with $25 Flex Dollars per semester, which can be used for any purchases in the Campus Store. The Full Plan also comes with five guest swipes so you can treat a friend or guest to a meal. (Any unused Flex Dollars and guest swipes expire at the end of each semester, so be sure to use them since they don’t carry forward to future semesters.)

Students living in the one of the Townhouse Apartments or one of the four full apartments in the McLean Environmental Living and Learning Center are required to have a meal plan, but may select the Alternate Plan (330 meals) or Commuter Plan (130 meals).

2024–25 Meal Plan Pricing and Additional Details

Compost Program

It wouldn’t be right to talk about eating without also mentioning composting—because it’s something we do at every meal. Even our dorm kitchens are stocked with compost pails. Roughly 34,000 pounds of food scraps are collected annually from the cafeteria and residence hall kitchens. Food waste is brought to our compost partner, where it turns into a valuable fertilizer called compost.

Since student volunteers first launched the campus composting program in 1993, Northland College has kept literally hundreds of tons of food waste out of the landfill. Our compost program is run almost entirely by work-study students who help manage daily food scrap collection. Campus compost is processed by a local business—which was spun off from Northland in 2021—that makes finished compost available to local farms (some of which provide fruits and veggies to our cafeteria) and community members.