Havin Rehwinkel’s first job as a young teen was at a mom-and-pop restaurant in his hometown of Plainfield roughly 30 years ago, and he’s worked in food service ever since. Almost 11 years ago he came to Viterbo University, leaving behind a great job as chef for a restaurant and venue that catered 175 weddings per year.

Why? He did it for the kids.

Of course, he’s talking about his two daughters. A big reason he left that chef job was he rarely got to spend evenings with his daughters or read them a story and tuck them in at night.

A big part of why he loves his work at Viterbo, though, also has to do with bigger “kids,” the students he feeds day in and day out. “I love to see the smiles when the kids come into the Caf every day,” Rehwinkel said. “Higher education to me is an amazing role.”

Rehwinkel has been in charge of feeding Viterbo’s students for about a year, at first on an interim basis and now as food service director for Aramark, the company that serves the university’s myriad dining needs.

In the time he’s been at Viterbo, Rehwinkel has seen a major shift on the part of students toward healthier eating. The Caf used to serve 250 hamburgers at every lunch, for example. It now serves 50 to 75 burgers, and the amount of French fries served has been cut in half.

“You can see the wave. Every year they get more health conscious. It’s been cool to see,” he said.

Viterbo, like the country at large, also has a lot more people who can’t consume gluten, and Rehwinkel emphasized that his operation takes great pains to give people with gluten issues an array of options comparable to the rest of the student body.

Any student with special dietary needs, Rehwinkel emphasized, only needs to let him know about it, and he will take the necessary steps to accommodate them. One student this year, for example, wanted to have yogurt with active cultures as part of her nutritional regiment, and he made sure the Caf had that available.

Rehwinkel wants students to get what they need whenever that’s possible, even if it’s something as simple as, say, a craving for strawberries that might not be out as an offering but could be stocked for use later. “If there’s something special, they can just go ahead and ask,” he said. “We treat the kitchen as if it belongs to the students. It’s the little things where we go above and beyond.”

Viterbo did something this year to make it easier for all students to eat healthier, Rehwinkel noted. In November, Viterbo was one of three colleges served by Aramark to pilot an Eat to Excel app that allowed students to “build their plates” to achieve their nutritional goals.

By the end of the year, one out of three Viterbo students had downloaded the app, such a success that all Aramark schools across the country will offer the app when fall semester begins.

A three-sport athlete in high school who coached high school football for eight years, Rehwinkel knows how important good nutrition is for Viterbo’s student-athletes, and he knows how hard it can be with their game and practice schedules to get to the Caf some days. That’s why Viterbo started an Athletic Packout program that provides box lunches for busy athletes as well as giving coaches the chance to choose from six bulk food items to stock their buses and keep the players fueled up.

Rehwinkel also is well aware that students not involved in sports need more flexibility in their meal plans, whether because of full class loads, internships, or hectic music or theatre rehearsal schedules.

To address that need for flexibility, Viterbo has taken several steps:

• expanded the Caf’s hours of operation
• added more tier choices to the meal plan menu
• started a Green-to-Go program that allows students with meal plans to fill a provided reusable container with food from the Caf that they can eat later when their schedules allow
• given students with meal plans the option of using those plans to get something to eat at two spots on campus open longer hours (Einstein’s and The Pod, the convenience store in the student union).

This time next year, Rehwinkel might well be talking about more new improvements to Viterbo’s food service. Aramark is all about being responsive to changing needs and continual improvement, he said.

“It’s an all-around partnership with the school, and it’s our job to listen,” Rehwinkel said. “Our biggest thing at Aramark is we hear you, we understand, and we get it.”