Bridgewater, Va.- On Feb. 6, Bridgewater College announced their partnership with Grubhub, allowing Bridgewater students to use BC Bucks to order from off-campus local restaurants.

By downloading the Grubhub app and creating an account, students can access their account settings and go under Campus Dining to find and add a campus card from Bridgewater College. By following the prompts, students can activate their free Grubhub+ Student membership and order from anywhere that accepts Grubhub.

The Grubhub+ Student membership benefits students by allowing them unlimited free delivery to orders more than $18.

“For several years, there has been an interest to expand the use of BC Bucks beyond campus,” said Network Administrator and IT Security Officer Joe Meslovich. “It has been a recurring topic for the better part of the last decade.”

Meslovich explained that partnerships like this require the off-campus vendor to participate in CBord’s UGryd service. CBord is Bridgewater’s ID Card system provider, while UGryd is their commerce solution. 

Grubhub independently worked with CBord to create an integration with UGryd, so any restaurant that was already on GrubHub would immediately have access to UGryd.

“I think it is terrific and should have been advertised more before people already spent their BC Bucks,” said sophomore Savannah Clark.

The student body at Bridgewater has had mixed feelings about the partnership with Grubhub and the concept of BC Bucks. The credit that residents get from Parkhurst every semester is not usable with Grubhub, but rather only at Parkhurst registered locations.

“At first it sounded pretty good, but now that I know how it works, I am not really sure,” said sophomore Luis Gutierrez. “I don’t think it is as useful as it sounds, and I would probably not make use of it.”

The consideration into the integration was intended to benefit students and was hard to turn down as it was a free add-on.

“Last year, CBord made us aware that we could add the GrubHub integration for no additional cost to the college,” said Meslovich. “The integration was already included in the licensing and services that we already paid for.  They pitched it as a great way to get our foot in the door for off-campus use of BC Bucks for no additional cost.  All we had to do was formally ask for CBord to turn the GrubHub integration on.  Once IT was made aware of this, the proposal was brought to the cabinet and the decision was made to enable the integration.”

Students were able to access this feature since August 2022, however, the official announcement from Bridgewater did not happen until Feb. 6. There are several students around campus that took advantage of this opportunity early.

“What’s the point of this if ordering off of Grubhub with my own money and using BC Bucks is no difference,” said senior James Yeboah.