Baala Shakya, Staff Photographer

Yalies can now see how adventurous their Yale dining habits are. 

First years William Qian ’28, Varshith Vadlamudi ’28, Owen Zhang ’28 and Anish Lakkapragada ’28 launched a Chrome Extension that shines light on diverse dining experiences with data. Inspired by Spotify Wrapped, which provides users with a personalized summary of their most-streamed songs and artists each year, “Yale Hospitality Wrapped” allows Yalies to see how often they visited each of Yale’s 14 dining halls, Commons, the BowWow and Steep Cafe for each meal of the day.

“We hope that students look forward to checking their semesterly [Yale] Hospitality wrapped and look to compare how their eating habits have changed over the semester, similar to how Spotify users look forward to discovering how their music tastes have changed over the year,” said Vadlamudi.

One of the features assigns Yalies their “Dining Diversity Score.”

According to Zhang, the score is calculated using the Shannon entropy concept from information theory. Eating different meals at different dining halls increases a user’s Dining Diversity Score. Zhang said he had seen scores ranging from 12 to 91.

“I thought the Dining Diversity Score would be a fun way for friends to compare, or even compete, how much they’re “evenly” exploring the different residential dining halls at Yale,” Zhang said. “Obviously, it’s not a bad thing to have go-tos, but we hope that this feature helps promote more exploration and facilitates unexpected friendships over new dining habits. It certainly has for me.”

The quartet of first years first came up with the idea for the Chrome Extension while discussing their recently released 2024 Spotify wraps over dinner. After realizing there wasn’t an entertaining way to view Yalies’ dining experiences, the team collaborated over winter break to create the extension.

Zhang told the News that they began the project thinking that accessing Yale Hospitality data would be one of their largest obstacles due to security reasons. However, the team discovered that Yale Hospitality releases secure ID data on dining hall swipes, which extension users can access with their NetID login.

While Yale Hospitality Wrapped is currently only offered as a Chrome Extension — which can be downloaded directly from the Chrome Web Store — the developers plan to increase accessibility and add additional features.

“Yale Hospitality Wrapped is far from finished,” Lakkapragada said. “We are excited to create richer wrapped features, such as monitoring what meals you ate on days you swiped and which days you skipped meals.”

The team is also looking forward to hearing feedback from users on how to better display students’ eating habits.

However, the developers have also acknowledged some shortcomings of the data pulled from Yale Hospitality when creating the wrapped.

Because certain colleges share joint IDs — Branford and Saybrook, Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray and Morse and Ezra Stiles — each pair of dining halls is counted as the same swipe with no differentiation between them appearing on the wrapped. Furthermore, weekend brunches count as breakfast.

Richelle Chang ’28, who recently viewed her Yale Hospitality Wrapped, said that she found the extension to be quite creative and that she greatly enjoyed conducting “Yale Hospitality Wrapped reveals” with her friends.

“I’m surprised that [Jonathan Edwards] was my go-to dining hall for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” said Chang. “I also realized that there are still three dining halls that I’ve never even been to, so I definitely want to change that this semester.” 

As of Tuesday, Jan. 21, about 400 Yalies have used the extension to access their wrapped.

Yale Dining serves over 14,000 meals a day across its residential dining halls and retail outlets.