Sustainable, Healthy and Affordable Food Choices

Offering Sustainable food choices on campus | Healthy and Affordable food on campus

The American University of the Middle East (AUM) offers indoor and outdoor food courts that can accommodate a large number of students and faculty/staff who can enjoy a variety of healthy and affordable food on campus without the need to leave the campus during their studies or working hours. Numerous restaurants and cafes under reputable brands with stringent food safety guidelines and sustainable food practices are available in different areas inside the campus to serve the students and faculty/staff at discounted prices up to 30% which makes the options priced reasonably compared to external market prices. Vegetarian and vegan food options are provided by these restaurants / cafes. 

PICK 

For instance, the restaurant “PICK” is available on campus to provide its healthy food, snacks and meals to the campus community.

PICK serves readymade, freshly prepared “BALANCED” food that’s good for all types of diets. Each item displayed has full nutritional information, this allows any PICK customer to pick whatever he or she needs for any meal throughout the whole day. Read more.

Extract from AUM Mobile App - Restaurants and Cafés on campus

Sustainable Food Practices

Designated representatives from AUM conduct recurrent visits to the restaurants and cafes to ensure everything is at an optimum level of sustainable food practices, cleanliness and hygiene. Below are some examples of these restaurants’ commitment to social responsibility and sustainable food practices:

Fresh Palm Trees Harvesting Season

Fresh palm dates produced by the trees on campus are harvested and distributed to the community during the harvest season, which happens to be at the end of each academic year. Additional evidence.

Being a focal point for sports, exercise, and athletics

Universities Athletic Association of Kuwait

The UAAK was founded by AUM at the start of the 2015 academic year to promote inter-university sports competitions for male and female students. Participating Private Universities Teams compete over the academic year for each sport and for the overall championship of the UAAK, which is determined by the accumulating points of success from each sport.

Sports included in the UAAK are football, basketball, volleyball, futsal, squash, table tennis, and tennis, swimming, and squash. All sports are open to both male and female.

Link to AUM teams competing locally against other universities in the UAAK.

Sports Awards Ceremonies honoring AUM Sports Champion teams

As part of our belief in the importance of athletics to promote a culture of well-being and in its contribution to the learning experience of our students, our sports teams were honored by the AUM Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Mr. Fahad Al Othman. Only in 2019, AUM sports teams had around 20 achievements to highlight. In 2023, AUM sports teams had 10 achievements.

Tool at the gym to measure body composition analysis, fitness level, and training progress

In 2022, the Sports Center launched the Body Composition Analysis providing weight, fat percentage, muscle mass, body water, calorie intake, circumference, and more.

Selected award winning student projects on SDG2. Zero Hunger

LaYengat

Third Place in AUM Startup Challenge and among top 10 in Babson Global Challenge: This project focused on food waste management through an application that helps redistributing excess food while giving accessibility to lower income individuals. Team members: Shouq AlSamhan and Sarah AlOmani 

Smart Agriculture Monitoring and Controlling System using Multi-agents model

Led to a published indexed paper: Students introduced a smart irrigation system that monitors and controls the agricultural field wirelessly using Zigbee technologies. It considers various parameters such as temperature, humidity, moisture, gas concentration. This system was implemented and tested on a small farm to keep track of the status of the farm, represent the current behavior of the system and react immediately in case of abnormal reading. Results show that the application of this system improved the quality and increased production on the farm.

Soft Drink Supply Chain Sustainability in Kuwait

1st place winner of IEOM Supply Chain and Logistics Competition at International Conference and competition participation, 13th International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management (IEOM) in Manila, Philippines, March 6-9, 2023: The study targeted three soft drink companies in Kuwait, to successfully identify sustainability problems relating to the three pillars of sustainability in the companies’ supply chains. To illustrate the benefit of the sustainability initiatives, a multiple regression model was built by collecting data from the Refinitiv database. The regression results showed that there is a U-shaped relationship between the firm value and environmental sustainability performance.

Research on SDG2. Zero Hunger

Journal articles

Conference proceedings