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Campus Dining announced in a press release Feb. 27 that Rand Dining Hall will no longer offer the Rand Cookie, 14 years after it was first introduced. Per the press release, the facility that produces the dough closed.
Rand offered the last batch from Mar. 2-6, and a black curtain was placed where the cookie used to be to symbolize a period of mourning for the cookie. Campus Dining will be holding a taste-test event Mar. 17 where students will be able to vote on their preferred cookie.
Student members of the Dining Advisory Board as well as members of Vanderbilt Student Government participated in a Feb. 26 confidential tasting to narrow down the potential replacements for the Rand Cookie.
Sophomore Lana Das, a member of the Dining Advisory Board, explained the information the dining team revealed about the discontinuation of the cookie.
“The factory got shut down in January and [Vanderbilt] wasn’t told about it, so they went to go fulfill their order again and they found out in January — on their production sheet it said zero — so they didn’t even find out in a proper way,” Das said. “They said that if the factory had moved to the West Coast, they would’ve made it work and had the dough shipped here, but because the factory shut down and production had already stopped, they couldn’t do anything about it.”
Sophomore Aneesh Dahuja, a member of the Dining Advisory Board, described the dining team’s process in finalizing a new cookie.
“[The manufacturer] told Vanderbilt, I think, [during the] first week of the year, and Vanderbilt’s been trying to find a replacement since then,” Dahuja said. “The dining team has been contacting a bunch of suppliers, trying a huge amount of cookies. I think they started with 20 different options, [then] they narrowed it down to six, and they had the dining advisory board narrow it down to the final two.”
The dining team explained why the recipe could not be replicated in-house at Vanderbilt in a message to The Hustler.
“The original Rand Cookie is going away because of operational changes from the dough supplier, J&J Snack Foods, which no longer offers the product at any of its current facilities. Once we learned the dough would no longer be available, our team explored multiple options, including whether the cookie could be recreated internally. Recreating the original cookie at the scale needed to serve Rand would require replicating ingredient blends, such as a margarine blend, that Campus Dining does not currently utilize in house-made offerings,” the statement reads.
Das defended the dining team in response to misconceptions about the discontinuation of the cookie.
“They don’t know how long it’ll be until we get a new cookie; it could even be until April. They were very adamant to say that this was the last thing they would have wished for. There’s this misconception that dining wanted to discontinue the Rand cookie and it’s just like a strategic move or something, but there’s literally nothing they could have done to stop it because the factory got shut down,” Das said.
Junior Luke Wells expressed disappointment at the news of the cookie being phased out in a message to The Hustler.
“It’s something I never thought I’d hear. Since freshman year, I would guess I’ve averaged about four rookies [Rand cookies] a week, so the fact that I unwittingly ate my last rookie last semester (I’m abroad right now) is soul-crushing,” Wells said. “Rand won’t be Rand without it. I’m a creature of habit and get Rand for lunch about 95% of weekdays, but I think I’ll finally branch out to other dining halls for lunch if the rookie isn’t going to be there.”
Wells further detailed his hopes for how the university will move forward.
“I’m woefully uninformed on how this sort of process works, but what I don’t understand is why we can’t just buy the recipe,” Wells said. “Especially if the current plan is just to replace it with a different cookie, I just don’t see what’s stopping us from buying their recipe and using it. But putting that idea aside, I appreciate that they’re having a taste test and giving students a say in the replacement.”
Swarada Kulkarni assisted in reporting on this story.
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