durfees.jpgStudents who head to Durfee’s to replenish their solo cups after this year’s Camp Yale festivities will find a very different convenience store — and pizza pies.

Yale Dining has significantly renovated the inside of the store, expanding into a former stock room and adding more refrigerated cases. “The store layout is completely different from what it was,” said Tom Tucker, Yale Dining’s director of retail development and operations. “We’ve made merchandising easier to find.”

In addition to the new look, Tucker said he is hoping to expand the offerings at Durfee’s to include more organic and locally grown foods.

And sustainability aside, Yale Dining seems to have an eye toward one of the most important items in a college student’s diet.

“We’ll have pizza available,” Tucker said. “We bought a new turbo oven.”

Whole pizzas will be sold, but Tucker said that in the future he hopes to experiment with selling by the slice and asking local producers to make the pizza, calling it “an evolutionary program.”

Tucker emphasized that these are not the final changes to the new Durfee’s. A “what are we missing?” board will give students the opportunity to suggest items not currently found in the store.

(Photo: Yale Dining)