Juliet Stouffer
At the beginning of fall semester, the napkin boxes that sat on tables in the Cage and Stav Hall were removed. Many students on campus have been struck with the same question: where did the napkins go? Notes on the suggestion board by Stav’s exit have been filled with questions and no answers.
According to Director of Operations for Bon Appétit Dylan Johnson, the disappearance of the napkins is for a study that is being held on campus, led by Allanah Carron ’26. This past summer, Carron took on a newly-established internship position at Bon Appétit, and within this role, she used her quantitative economics and sociology/anthropology majors to conduct a study on napkin use on campus.
The purpose of the study is to look at the way napkins are used on campus from both an economic and environmental standpoint. There will be three different studies about these napkins: the first to see if the larger napkin towers are the best way to go, the second regarding keeping the individual napkin holders on tables, and the third, the wooden baskets that were recently implemented in Stav. This is all to observe how costs for napkins can go down and how many napkins are used per day. Carron evaluates napkin use by counting the number of packages remaining in the napkin cases received by Bon Appétit weekly.
Some people may be wondering if the old napkin holders will return, which will be answered once the study concludes. As of now, Johnson does not know. According to Johnson, there are many questions left to be answered. Do the baskets help staff fill the napkin holders more efficiently? Do the students like the new baskets or just napkin towers? Does the removal of the old boxes help lower costs and environmental damage?
Another common question from the campus community is, if the plastic holders are to be taken away for environmental reasons, then what will happen to the leftover 200 to 300? According to Johnson, students have already stolen so many plastic napkin holders that Bon Appétit only has 75 remaining.
“One of the reasons we started this study was because so many of the napkin holders went missing, and we had to order more, but before I went and ordered hundreds more, our department wanted to see if they were actually necessary,” Johnson said in an interview with The Olaf Messenger.
The mystery of the missing napkins was solved. This was not a moment of malicious thievery, but a moment where Bon Appétit wished to see how much St. Olaf students used their napkins. Based on the outcry in the past weeks, it is clear that the napkins have been missed.