In 2019, NC State partnered with the mobile food app Grubhub in order to make ordering meals from campus restaurants easier and more convenient for students. Overall, this partnership has succeeded in making preordering food more efficient and has reduced lines at popular restaurants. However, it has one crucial flaw — the lack of customization options on the app unnecessarily restricts options for students with food allergies. This has made eating on campus much harder for students like me, but luckily there is an easy solution.

I have always been the friend with the most complicated food orders because of the number of customizations I make to my meals. Is it because I am a picky eater? Maybe a little bit, but it is also because I have Celiac disease: a genetic autoimmune disorder that can be described as the big brother of the more well-known gluten allergy.

Being Celiac means that I cannot eat wheat, rye, barley or oats without getting sick and ending up in the hospital. This is because my body does not recognize these grains and therefore attacks them like they are poison. For me, being gluten-free is not a dietary option or trend; it is a necessity. Consequently, I cannot eat at a lot of places on campus, such as Red Sky Pizza, without getting sick. 

Luckily, NC State has done a fairly good job of offering gluten-free options at the most popular restaurants on campus, such as Tuffy’s Diner. There is one simple change that NC State and Grubhub could make to do an even better job about offering allergy-friendly substitutions at places like the Atrium and Talley Student Union.

If the Grubhub app were to add a customization option to their platform, students with food allergies would be able to make themselves an allergy-friendly dish by simply adjusting meal options from restaurants they cannot currently eat at. This would triple the food options for students on campus with dietary restrictions and open up a whole new range of possibilities.

To give you an example, the other day I was attempting to order a hamburger from Union ‘51 Burger in the Atrium, but I ended up not being able to because there was no way to customize their burger options. The only thing I cannot eat on a burger is the bread. If you take the bread off, it not only becomes a perfectly good meal, but it also becomes one of my only sources of meat nowadays. However, there is no way to simply take the bread off of my order through Grubhub and because of that, a whole entire restaurant becomes unavailable to me despite an easy solution being right there.

I acknowledge the fact that allowing students to customize their meals on Grubhub may put a bigger strain on restaurant workers who have to make the orders, but I feel like this is a small price to pay for expanding the options of students with dietary restrictions. Grubhub could even format the customization option to eliminate unnecessary “picky eating” requests by pre-selecting key substitutions for students to select. One such substitution option could be “no bread” or “no cheese” on a hamburger. This would keep the customization simple and make eating on campus easier.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Grubhub. It makes using my meal plan money outside of the dining halls super easy and the fact that I can see wait times helps make sure I never run late to class because of food. However, nothing is perfect, and trying to piece together allergy-friendly meals without customization options makes eating on campus a pain. Grubhub should seriously consider adding a customization option to their app to make perfectly delicious restaurants more accessible for students with dietary restrictions.