Long ago, I used to love Halal Shack. It easily stood out as the most nutritious and customizable meal exchange option on campus, but that love was shattered when the menu withered away.
The price-gouging has been a slow roll out process throughout fall 2024 and spring 2025. Halal Shack marked up the crispy chicken, forcing customers to pay $2 more for it. The price hike made it impossible to get with the meal exchange and felt entirely arbitrary when the regular grilled chicken had no extra fees. How is the breading and frying process so costly? Are they dipping the chicken into a vat of gold? We are already spending thousands of dollars to have a meal plan, and UTD Dining can’t afford to let us eat crispy chicken. Strange.
Then they came for the hummus. Only two places on campus offer hummus — and one of those places is Dining Hall West, so we can say that really, only one place on campus offers hummus. I personally am not interested in risking food poisoning by eating the beige mush that the dining hall calls hummus. If I want a small scoop of hummus with a rice bowl, I now have to pay an extra $0.99 which means I can’t get it as part of the meal exchange. Ten ounces of hummus at Walmart typically costs $3 for regular hummus and about $4 for organic or special varieties of it. Getting three scoops of hummus costs $3 and barely amounts to four ounces of hummus if the server is generous. I can’t imagine how slim the margins must be for UTD Dining if they feel obligated to charge us an extra dollar for the idea of hummus.
And perhaps worst of all is the change to the cheese offerings. As a college student, I never even considered the feta cheese option since such luxuries are beyond my comprehension, but even the mozzarella cheese eludes me now with the additional $0.99 fee. At that point, I am just being extorted if I ask for anything beyond rice and lettuce in my bowl.
The cheapest weekly meal plan option costs $2,219.10 and lets you eat on campus 10 times a week, five of which may be used for meal exchange. Taking half of that cost and spreading it out across the sixteen-week semester gives us a grand total of $69.35 to be spent on meal exchanges each week, or about $14 per meal. The traditional toppings that Halal Shack used to offer as part of the meal — which continue to be offered at Halal Shacks at other universities — simply aren’t included in the UTD plan anymore. The $14 price places Halal Shack’s meal exchange option almost at the exact price point they offer their non-meal exchange options at, and that doesn’t include traditional toppings like cheese or hummus. Nor does it consider whatever contracts UTD might have behind the scenes with Chartwells Higher Education, which oversees all dining locations on campus.
Chartwells is well-known for its near constant controversies. Chartwells and its parent company, Compass Group, have tried to bribe United Nations officials, given the prisoners they service listeria, paid millions in settlements to brush aside scandals and consistently served moldy and substandard meals to its university clients. For a catering conglomerate, Compass Group is in far too many scandals to mention all of them in just this article. Chartwells and its parent company somehow finds the funds to pay out multi-million-dollar settlements on the regular, but they can’t even provide us with hummus or cheese. The cherry on top is that UTD’s contract with Chartwells has never been made public. Who knows what secret schemes were cooked up between President Richard Benson and the Compass Group – perhaps price hiking hummus and cheese is part of a multi-stage plan to silence dissent on campus by keeping students sad and malnourished.
Thousands of students at UTD are required to buy meal plans to even live on campus, and UTD is failing them by letting Chartwells lower the quality of its options. We continue losing meal exchange options, as seen by the recent loss of The Pub and Smoothie King, and in their place we have only seen locations that don’t accept meal exchanges, like TeaCo and Buffalo Wild Wings, pop up.
UTD should give us more meal exchange options, it should improve the value students get out of their meal plans and it should give us our Halal Shack hummus back.
One Comment
What sources did you get this information from?
In regards to the “price gouging” have you considered that the current Administration in the White House is the reason prices everywhere are going up? Don’t blame it on UTD or Chartwells.