Editorial: Dining services handled Croutons incident with a lack of transparency

Croutons had a leak of unhealthy water in their back room and they didn’t tell the student body about it. Let that sink in for a moment. You could be sick from their food right now.

Now that sentiment can seem, at a glance, like fear-mongering. Food was not prepared in the back room where the leak started. A cleaning crew was called in to insure a full clean up, according to the head of dining services.

But that clean up didn’t happen until at least a full day after the leak presented itself. And in between then, an honest face was not presented to the public.

They should have warned you.

From what we know about public relations, the simplest way to avoid a crisis is transparency – getting ahead of a problem, being very open about the precautions taken and doing so without being prompted by outside forces. It’s about getting a leader from your group out there making statements to the public.

But they didn’t really do that — not University of Toledo dining services or Aramark, the food service corporation they contract. Sure, two dining administrators spoke to our reporter. But they did so only after she prompted them. And sure, someone put a sign up outside of Croutons on Wednesday evening when they closed early. But that sign mentioned no leak.

To be precise, it read, “We are currently closed due to equipment malfunction. We are sorry for the inconvenience and will resume normal business hours tomorrow.”

Dining services took a big risk in not telling the public about the dirty water in their storeroom that sat overnight between Wednesday and Thursday. They left themselves open to lawsuit if someone would become ill after eating at Croutons.

Dining services’ silence is also disrespectful to customers and anyone else who has anything to do with them. Those who pay money to eat the food and who have a vested interest in the success of the restaurants deserve the transparent truth right away. If they lose any customers now that this news is out, they deserve it for being misleading about the cause of the issue.

But who was being proactive about sharing this information? A member of the dining services staff who wouldn’t even talk on the record for fear of losing their job.

Dining certainly needs to examine the external aspect of this issue, but they should also take a look within. Whether they mean to create a culture of silence, dining services administrators should not cultivate an environment wherein employees don’t feel as though they can speak freely without getting fired. It’s disrespectful and harmful to quality, morale and productivity. And at the end of the day, it all reflects badly on the university.

We’re not experts on Aramark or UT’s whistleblower policies, but if your own workers are so afraid for their livelihoods that they can’t talk about this kind of issue publicly, you are doing something wrong.

It appears to us that dining services maintains the kind of professional setting where employees can’t talk about their organization. In this case, that issue has health implications.

Perhaps no one did get sick. We haven’t heard of anyone getting sick directly as a result from eating Croutons last week. However, we don’t know everything that happens on campus, and possible victims may not themselves realize the cause of their discomfort.

More importantly, it doesn’t matter. Dodging metaphorical bullets shouldn’t be the standard of practice at this university.

Hopefully, this experience will be a lesson learned. Dining services will hopefully be more transparent about any future problems, and maybe those involved in fixing and clean-up will be quicker on the reaction.

But unless that lesson is learned, UT has a valid reason to critically consider this incident when evaluating dining services — and when it comes time for a contract renewal with Aramark.