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100 pounds of Nutella a day: A dining hall at New York’s Columbia University is serving out as much as 100 pounds of Nutella—the hazelnut and chocolate spread—per day. But officials think some students are stealing it.
Students at one Columbia University dining hall are consuming as much as 100 pounds of Nutella a day, with the New York City school spending as much as $5,000 a week on the chocolaty confectionery.
Vicki Dunn, the director of dining services for Columba, told the Columbia Spectator: “The demand [for Nutella] has been greater than originally expected.”
Columbia started offering Nutella in Ferris Booth Commons, one of its dining halls, in February.
“Students have been filling cups of Nutella to-go in Ferris Booth Commons and taking the full jars out of John Jay, which means we’re going through product faster than anticipated,” she continued.
However, the Spectator points out that the school’s Nutella might be getting stolen by some of the students, who take it back to their dorms.
And when the price was calculated to cost around $5,000 per week, Dunn “couldn’t really believe it either, just how much they were going through the stuff,” she told the paper.
At this rate, the dining hall’s program could be spending as much as $250,000 on Nutella per year, as Business Insider calculated.
Columbia College Student Council member Peter Bailinson talked with Dunn about how much Nutella is being taken by students back to their dorms.
“People take silverware, cups and plates, and that adds up over the course of a year to a lot of money,” he told The New York Times. “With Nutella, it added up much more quickly. Where Dining might have to spend $50,000 to replace silverware and cups, they were spending thousands of dollars on Nutella in one week.” A 26.5-ounce jar of Nutella costs around $7.
Another student council member, Grayson Warrick, said that when people take the Nutella back to their living quarters, they waste a lot of it.
“When you’re paying that much for a dining plan, some people feel a bit more entitled to taking things from the dining hall,” he told the Spectator. “But what they don’t realize is that dining uses any extra money to get awesome new items like Nutella, almond butter, and to make structural changes.”
A junior with Columbia told the New York Daily News she wasn’t pleased with so many students taking the spread with them to their dorm rooms.
“Today, they ran out and people were disappointed,” said student Jessica Rogers.
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