While students are away for the summer, Dining Services is busy making changes to both Beaker’s Coffee Cart in Owens Science Hall and the Summit Marketplace.

“We’re doing some fun stuff,” Gayle Lamb, Dining Services’ manager of cash operations, said of this summer’s remodeling projects.

Beakers and Summit Marketplace are scheduled to have new looks and some new equipment when students return from summer vacation Sept. 4. While Lamb called remodeling Beaker’s the more “aggressive” project, she said Summit Marketplace will undergo a “decorative refresh.”

Beaker’s experiences a “total remodel”

After a health inspector notified Dining Services in May that Beaker’s would need to add a three compartment sink in order to stay in business, the university decided this summer would be the perfect time to take on a project already in the works: giving the coffee cart a “total remodel.”

“It was the perfect time to definitely get in and refresh the space because they have excellent foot traffic there … that place, it hops,” Lamb said.

Updating the coffee cart’s original equipment by adding digital signs, a new service counter, cabinets and refrigerators may even increase interest, Lamb said.

“People will be curious about a new space and it’s just going to have a different feel to it certainly,” Lamb said. “We had all this blue formica and it was getting pretty tired.”

The project was approved Monday and is scheduled to be finished by the fall semester, a time frame that Lamb said could pose a challenge.

“We’re going to squeeze it in,” she said. “It’s going to be close for opening by school.”

Construction hasn’t started yet, but preparations have.

“We’re still getting equipment out of there and putting it into storage so that the floors can get cleaned and then everything can get prepped before the cabinetry can even get installed.”

As of Friday, Lamb said she did not have the project’s final cost, but she hopes the remodel will catch students’ eyes.

“The finishes are going to be really nice. You guys are going to really like the finishes,” Lamb said.

Summit Marketplace

“Effective” and “decorative” are two of Lamb’s goals heading into the second half of this summer’s Summit Marketplace makeover.

The convenience store located in the Anderson Student Center is adding digital signs to more effectively advertise hours and specials, replacing the vinyl signs that previously hung behind the register. Lamb hopes that repositioning the signs will be a better marketing technique.

“Within this building … they didn’t leave us any way to advertise our hours of operation. We can’t put anything on the windows because it’s fire code.”

While some new equipment will also be added to the marketplace, “unique” photos displayed on the walls above the chip rack will dress up the space.

“We went through the photo catalog that’s on campus here and found some really fun pictures … some really unique pictures that people don’t really know about,” Lamb said. “So we’re hoping that will make it fun. It was just kind of a sterile place when we built compared to Tommie Shop.”

With a new beverage cooler, awnings, slat board shelving and Tommie pride , Dining Services has its plate full with projects it plans to have completed before fall semester starts.

“It’s slowly coming together,” Lamb said. “We’re a little more than halfway done.”

Briggs LeSavage can be reached at lesa4364@stthomas.edu.