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In this article, we identify various foodservice-related attributes that are important for undergraduate students residing in hostels and avail service from specific foodservice providers. We also investigate the performance of attributes to determine areas where the foodservice providers should maintain a high performance or where improvement is required.

We apply the Kano methodology to design the questionnaire for 24 different attributes. For each attribute, we construct three questions; namely, functional type, dysfunctional type, and performance of the hostel foodservice. We collect a total of 317 responses. We use multiple methods to determine the dominant category. Finally, combining the values of these methods, we study relative positions of the attributes in the importance–performance grid.

Based on the Kano categorization, quality-related attributes are most important, followed by hygiene, comfort, availability, variety, and time, in the descending order. The gender of the respondent plays an important role in categorization of some attributes. Using the importance–performance analysis, we identify the attributes where the foodservice provider should maintain a high performance or where improvement is required. Improvements in some attributes are difficult due to foodservice provider's self-assessment of high performance or high difficulty for improvement.

In this study, we examine the importance of various foodservice attributes among undergraduate residential students. We combine multiple methods of Kano categorization to compute importance values of the attributes. We also investigate the reasons behind the gap between student's and foodservice manager's perception of the performance of these attributes.