It’s lunchtime on Fort Liberty. At Spears Ready Warrior Restaurant — the Army-run dining facility, or DFAC, along Goldberg Street — an ever-growing line of uniformed soldiers stand behind a sign made of printer paper that reads “Wait Here.” They’re holding bright red dining trays.
“You can step forward,” says a food server from behind her station. In front of her is a selection of the day’s menu: pasta, cauliflower, mashed potatoes and peas.
About 600 soldiers pass through Spears Ready every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Fort Liberty’s seven DFACs feed over 5,000 soldiers daily. Many are soldiers with Essential Station Messing status — mainly single soldiers ranked E1 to E6 who live on post and whose paychecks automatically pay for meals.
How those soldiers are fed at two DFACs is about to be updated. Spears Ready and Victory Warrior Restaurant, a new dining facility to be built on Normandy Drive, will be getting campus-style upgrades thanks to Fort Liberty leadership and the Army’s efforts to modernize dining options.
“We realize we cannot continue to feed soldiers like we have in the past,” Col. Mary Ricks, director of public affairs for XVIII Airborne Corps, told CityView. “Fort Liberty leaders continue to look for ways to improve and transform the dining experience for soldiers.”
The bistro at Spears Ready
Starting this summer, Spears Ready will no longer be a DFAC. It will be a “bistro.”
Instead of the current rotating menu and staple sandwich, salad, fast-food and desert stations, Spears Ready will feature “actions stations,” said Chief Warrant Officer 4 Zachary Glather, a food service lead at Fort Liberty. Those stations will be geared around types of cuisine, including Asian and Tex-Mex. A “manager’s choice” station will feature soldier-recommended meals that come out of Fort Liberty’s monthly DFAC Council meetings.
“It will give us civilian food and not military [food],” a male soldier eating lunch at Spears Ready told CityView when asked about the changes coming to the DFAC. “Even though we’re military, when you’re eating, when you’re dining in, you should be as relaxed as possible. So there should be as little military stuff as possible.”
Spears Ready’s culinary specialists will prepare the new food options mostly by individual plates rather than the current batch cooking system, like how it is in a restaurant, Glather explained.
Sergeant First Class Towanna Garcia, Spears Ready manager, recognizes that a DFAC isn’t the most enticing place to eat. She’s hoping Spears Ready’s incoming changes will make soldiers more willing to dine at the soon-to-be bistro.
“I’m excited to see how it’ll turn out,” Garcia said. “Because we have to catch up with the times.”
In addition to becoming a bistro, Spears Ready’s second dining room will be turned into a kiosk, the Army’s grab-and-go, gas station-like convenience store.
The updates have been two years in the making. But the time invested was worth it for Glather and his food service team, who have an opportunity to see their vision for the future of soldier dining come to life.
“Soldier readiness starts here in the dining facility,” Glather said. “Because you can build a team eating a meal [together] and, with the nutrition we offer, it helps them with their training.”
Just over $1 million from the Joint Culinary Center of Excellence out of Fort Gregg-Adams in Virginia was approved for the Spears Ready revamp. A contractor has also been selected, Glather said. Soldiers can expect construction to begin in late spring.
A privately run DFAC
The rest of the Army is catching up to Glather and his team’s vision for modernized dining facilities.
First reported by Task & Purpose, the Army released a request for proposals earlier this month for a private contractor to renovate five DFACs on installations across the country. The RFP asks the contractor to transform the DFACs into something similar to campus dining halls. The first will be a new facility on Fort Liberty called Victory Warrior Restaurant.
The selected contractor will be responsible for “providing 24/7 access to prepared healthy food based on patron demand,” according to the RFP. The food can be served à la carte, in a dine-in setting or through meal prep options. The RFP even includes delivery, though Task & Purpose reported that the Army could not provide specific details on how the process would work or if delivery would be a final requirement.
The contractor’s revamped menu must accommodate a variety of dietary, religious and medical restrictions. Beer and wine can be sold at the contractor’s DFACs, though liquor isn’t permitted. Alcohol also is not permitted as part of a soldier’s meal.
“People might actually start eating in Warrior Restaurants again,” a male soldier told CityView when asked whether he’s excited about the RFP’s updates. “Because now we have a lot of people who are meal card holders who just never eat at a dining facility and they opt to go and spend their actual paycheck on food rather than eating the food that’s provided.”
The dining facilities selected to be privately operated will be run by a head chef certified by the American Culinary Federation or with an equivalent credential. Private civilian cooks will work at the facilities, instead of the culinary specialists currently cooking and serving meals in DFACs across all installations.
However, since Victory is a new dining facility to be created by the contractor, none of Fort Liberty’s culinary specialists are at risk of being replaced by civilian cooks.
“We were fortunate enough where we picked a building on this base where it doesn’t impact our culinary specialists,” Glather said. “So, they’ll still be employed in their facilities and this campus-style dining venue from the RFP is just an addition to the food ecosystem on Fort Liberty.”
Glather said he hopes Victory could serve soldiers as soon as this summer. But that timeline could change depending on the contractor, he explained.
Contractors have until March 7 to submit a proposal to the Army to be the builder and operator of Victory and the other installations’ DFACs.
Food insecurity common on Fort Liberty
Nearly one in every three soldiers on Fort Liberty and their families have trouble accessing food, according to reporting from The Assembly.
Military OneSource, the U.S. Department of Defense’s service member and family support website, says some of the service members most at risk of food insecurity are those lacking easy access to dining facilities.
Even if close to a dining facility, the facilities’ limited hours may prevent a soldier from accessing food. For example, DFAC meals are dished out within 90-minute windows, with breakfast served between 7:45 and 9:15 a.m., lunch set between 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. and dinner hours ending as early as 6:30 p.m. at Spears Ready.
The Army’s solution to limited dining hours was the kiosk, which provides name-brand, grab-and-go meals and snacks for soldiers throughout the day. The Culinary Outpost, Fort Liberty’s kiosk near Iron Mike Fitness Center, is open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. It sees between 350 and 400 soldiers pick up anything from a full meal to a quick snack to a latte each day.
Two soldiers debate frozen meals at The Culinary Outpost kiosk on Fort Liberty, which offers full, hot and frozen meals in addition to snacks for soldiers to access 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. Credit: Morgan Casey / CityView 
Fort Liberty’s The Culinary Outpost is one of the Army’s kiosks, gas station-like, grab-and-go convenience stores for soldiers to access snacks, meals and coffee outside of formal dining facilities that can be found on many installations across the country. Credit: Morgan Casey / CityView 
By the end of the summer, Spears Ready Warrior Restaurant will be upgraded from a dining facility to a bistro with campus-style dining and a grab-and-go kiosk. Credit: Morgan Casey / CityView
“It works with our schedule,” XVIII Airborne Private Turner Jonathan told CityView while picking up his lunch at The Culinary Outpost. “We get to pick the food that best fits our needs, and I think it’s a great selection of food. It’s another option from DFAC and it’s something the lower enlisted appreciate.”
Non-military entities are also trying to tackle food insecurity on Fort Liberty. Cumberland County Department of Public Health established the Fort Liberty Women, Infant and Children clinic, which is dedicated to providing the federally funded supplemental nutrition program to military families on post. The clinic is located at the Joel Clinic on Logistics Street.
The county also created the Fort Liberty and Cumberland County Food Policy Council, the country’s first joint county-military food policy council. The council aims to decrease food insecurity and increase healthy food options on Fort Liberty and in the county.
CityView Reporter Morgan Casey is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. Morgan’s reporting focuses on health care issues in and around Cumberland County and can be supported through the CityView News Fund.