OBJECTIVES This study examined the usage status and the degree of satisfaction of university foodservice (UF) perceived by international students in Busan. METHODS A questionnaire survey was conducted on the utilization of UF, improvement requirements, preference type and recipe, as well as the importance and satisfaction of UF quality attributes as perceived by international students (n=604) at universities in the Busan area between April and June 2017. RESULTS UF was ‘generally satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ in about 35.4% of the study population, and ‘not very satisfied’ or ‘not satisfied at all’ in approximately 11.5%. Approximately 21.7% said that UF contributed to dietary life ‘very much’ or ‘quite significantly’ and 36.4% said ‘not very much’ or ‘not at all’. The largest demand for improvement of UF was ‘variety of menu’ (52.0%). The most leftover food in UF was kimchi (30.3%) and broth/stew (19.2%), and the major reason for having leftover was ‘not to one's taste’ (27.8%). After dividing the foodservice quality attributes into 5 factors - food quality and price, sanitation, convenience, physical environment, and service environment - and analyzing the importance and satisfaction of each factor, it was shown that satisfaction was generally lower than the degree of importance. Sanitation factor was high for both importance and satisfaction of UF, while convenience factor was high for the importance but low for satisfaction of UF. Four variables in the food quality and price factor (‘food taste’, ‘freshness of food’, ‘nutritive value of food’, and ‘reasonable price’) and 3 variables in the convenience factor (‘variety of menu’, ‘prompt food service’, and ‘display of the meals for the day’) had high importance but low satisfaction, showing the need for an improvement on these areas. CONCLUSIONS Based on the study results, it is necessary to improve the food quality, as well as the price and convenience factors, and to provide various menus to increase the satisfaction of UF in international students.
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