NorthBay biz talks with several local companies that strive to bring healthier and more ecologically responsible food to schoolchildren’s plates.
Slow Food USA, an educational nonprofit with the goal of creating a world in which everyone can enjoy food that is good, clean and fair, is using the delay as an opportunity. It created its “Time for Lunch” campaign to bring awareness to improve the overall quality and nutrition of school lunches by increasing the amount of money schools have available to spend per child; providing local, healthy alternatives to cheap processed foods; educating children on proper nutrition and using farm-to-school programs. It’s enlisting the help of supporters to write letters to their representatives to ask for these legislative changes. It wants our leaders on Capitol Hill to know children need to be protected from high-calorie fast and junk foods. Slow Food USA’s Advocacy Coordinator Gordon Jenkins says, “If these things aren’t done, America’s children will continue to lead the Western World in obesity rates and diet-related diseases such as diabetes.”
Last Labor Day, Slow Food USA organized a national “Eat-In,” where public potlucks and rallies took place in all 50 states in more than 300 schoolyards, backyards and other venues. Slow Food chapters in Marin, Napa and Sonoma counties all participated. Sonoma County alone hosted seven eat-ins, from the Russian River to Sonoma Valley. The largest affair took place at Bayer Farm Neighborhood Park and Gardens in the Roseland district of Santa Rosa, where more than 200 people dined on organic goat tacos, vegetarian tacos and dishes made with homegrown vegetables. They listened to Maria Echaveste, former deputy chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, now working with Roots of Change. Echaveste stated if kids aren’t given healthy lunches, they aren’t really being helped in the long run. Susan Campbell, Slow Food co-leader for the Russian River Chapter, says, “The eat-ins were a good way to create a wider sphere of awareness around children, nutrition and health.”
Starting from scratch
One way schools can control what goes into their lunches is to make them onsite. The Wright School District in Santa Rosa is always striving to improve the food it dishes up. It serves about 22,000 lunches per year to a diverse population; between 65 and 70 percent of kids in the district participate in the free or reduced lunch program. Making things from scratch cuts cost and improves flavor. One example is the fresh baked breads it serves, which are made in each of the schools’ kitchens with applesauce in place of shortening, half wheat and half white flour, and whole oats when they’re available. It tries to provide traditional foods that kids like, but looks for ways to cut the fat and calories. Low fat cheese on pizzas and sweet potatoes in the low-fat cinnamon rolls (for the breakfast program) are just two ways it sneaks in healthier food.
Cathy Moura, the district’s food service manager, says, “We do have some canned or frozen items, but we try to use mostly fresh ingredients. When things are fresh, they look and taste more appealing.” The school district is able to purchase much of its produce locally from Imwalle Gardens. Owner Joe Imwalle often talks to the school cooks to let them know what’s abundant and in-season, so they can plan their menus accordingly. The district also tries to make healthy purchases, such as ground turkey, when commodities are offered through the state, and buys its milk locally from Clover Stornetta. It’s an “offer vs. serve” policy. Children can pick three of five food groups available—which always include fruits, vegetables, a carbohydrate and some protein—giving them more control of their choices. Four years ago, it also started making salad bars available, which have been a great success ever since. The salad bars include things like kiwi, strawberries and jicama, items that children from the school district know and like.
During last year’s STAR (Standardized Testing and Reporting) testing, each child was given a free breakfast at school for each of the six days of the test. Volunteers put the breakfasts together and teachers passed them out to the students first thing in class. The teachers reported that the demeanor of kids was more focused and they settled into the testing with more ease than in past years.
A new revolution
But what if you can’t make your own lunches? That’s where Revolution Foods comes in. Its founding team, Kristin Richmond and Kirsten Tobey, who met at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, believes all students should have access to healthy, fresh food on a daily basis. The two women are based in Oakland and have spent a large portion of their careers in education. They were named by BusinessWeek magazine as two of America’s most promising social entrepreneurs of 2009, and their company has served more than 5 million meals to about 40,000 students since its inception four years ago.
Establishing key strategic partnerships with healthy food suppliers like Whole Foods Market, Organic Valley, Stonyfield Farm and local farmers has been one of the keys that lets them deliver on their promise of affordable, all natural, safe and fresh meals for students. “It’s super challenging. This is a tough business—the margins are tight,” says Richmond.
To keep costs down, they take a scratch-cooking approach to food, using whole, real ingredients. Nothing is reheated or overly processed. “It’s back to basics,” she says. “We absolutely believe health and wellness is directly related to nutrition. One way our communities can battle obesity is to offer something that will set students up for success,” Richmond says. She and her business partner know that kids can be tricky customers, and that the food has to be really delicious or they won’t eat it.
Revolution Foods uses student focus groups to taste test the food. Even though they serve extremely diverse communities, including schools in affluent areas of Marin and low-income parts of Sonoma County, the standards are the same for everyone. They try to create excitement and build trust, so the students know the food they’re going to eat will be good. “By building a relationship with the children, we ensure they’re more apt to try new foods, and their palates will evolve,” says Richmond.
They’ve collected anecdotal evidence from the schools they serve that attention levels in class are higher, there are less disciplinary problems, kids display an increased interest in healthy food, and weight loss is occurring among the students who eat Revolution Food lunches. In addition to meals, they provide school customers with access to nutrition resources for building a healthier school community. There’s also a registered dietitian on the Revolution Food staff available to answer questions about healthy eating. They’ve recently expanded service to the Washington, D.C., area where they’re learning that the students’ food tastes are very different than those they’ve worked with in California. Their chefs and school partnerships staff visit schools regularly to conduct focus groups. This opportunity will provide Revolution Foods with the chance to craft new menus, especially designed for the D.C. schools they’ll serve. With a core mission that’s education and values driven, Richmond and Tobey are living their dream of building an affordable platform that serves delicious, healthy food all schools can afford.
Sushi goes mainstream
Not just companies can provide kids access to better food fare. Ed Metcalfe, owner/chef of Shiso, a modern Asian restaurant and sushi bar located right off the town square in Sonoma (soon to announce a new location in March), has started providing healthy bento box lunches to the local high school and two of his area’s middle schools. “With the healthy bento box, it’s easy to provide portion control,” says Metcalfe. He offers three main course choices: Teriyaki chicken, veggie futo maki roll or a California roll. Each box contains rice as the healthy carbohydrate, lean protein, including edamame, and vegetables. Everything is handmade in his restaurant and the presentation is visually appealing.
He came up with the idea to serve the bento boxes to students after his wife gave birth to his son, Maiko, now two years old. After Maiko was born, he began to think about what types of food children were eating. Metcalfe was already ordering the best and freshest ingredients he could find for his restaurant. He imagined the typical school lunch was filled with fat and inexpensive products that weren’t optimal for a child’s health. He also learned from his research that many high schoolers who were allowed to leave campus would often run to the local grocery store and purchase prepackaged sushi. In previous years, he and his business partner had great success selling Japanese-style lunches to companies such as Genentech in South San Francisco. Metcalfe hoped to replicate a similar model, delivering lunches to businesses in and around Sonoma County. But he also wanted to educate and expose children to his healthful and tasty style of food preparation.
Metcalfe went to area schools and talked to staff, parents and students. He also knew that his meals had to be reasonably priced or they wouldn’t sell. His research lead him to believe that the ideal price point was around $4 per lunch.
Metcalfe grew up in the restaurant business. His family ran four restaurants while he was growing up near Lake Tahoe. As a graduate of the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, Metcalfe worked at several notable restaurants in the United States and Europe, including the Michelin star-rated Restaurant Godt in Copenhagen. He was an accomplished chef, but catering to kids was different than trying to impress adults.
The program manager for food services for the Sonoma Valley School District, Donna Luzzi, was a little hesitant at first. After making sure Metcalfe wouldn’t be serving anything raw, she let him begin delivery of the bento boxes once a week to some of the schools in her district. Currently he sells about 100 boxes a week and is hoping to expand his lunch offerings to other schools in Sonoma as well as those in Marin and Napa counties. He’s found it gratifying that he’s had some parents come into Shiso as new customers saying that their teenagers were eating his lunches so they wanted to try his restaurant. This gives him the chance to introduce the parents to something new too—the joys of pairing local wines with sushi.
Waste not, want not
Helge Hellberg, executive director of Marin Organic, had just been hired as the first full time staff member in 2004 when he toured a farm and noticed overgrown zucchini lying by the wayside. He soon learned if produce doesn’t meet the strict market requirement for sale, such as being the right size or shape, it ends up as waste. Some can be used for livestock feed, but the rest is either plowed back into the soil or destroyed. He found that around 20 percent of produce grown in America is discarded. Then again at the grocery store, approximately 10 to 20 percent is once again thrown out. The average consumer proceeds to toss out another 15 to 20 percent when it doesn’t get used at home. Hellberg says, “So less than half of what we grow makes it onto our plates and into our bellies,” and he wanted to do something to prevent that.
The solution is Marin Organic’s “Organic School Lunch and Gleaning Program.” Marin Organic is an association of Marin County organic farmers and ranchers. All the producers agreed to donate “gleanable foods”—products that are aesthetically challenged and not quite fit for market but certified organic, wholesome and delicious nevertheless. Marin Organic assessed just how much it could get for free and then approached schools and other institutions such as elderly care facilities to ask if they could use the free harvest. It also opened up a new market for its members by asking new participating partners such as schools if they could use their small budgets to purchase local, organic produce from Marin’s organic producers. Since the schools and others would be getting so much for free, many could afford to buy the additional supplies at fair market value.
“It’s all about economic viability and leveraging resources the best way possible,” says Hellberg. “We could have just donated the free food, which is a wonderful thing to do. But now schools are buying from our producers and it adds an important income stream to their sales portfolios.
By getting the purchasing systems of institutions to connect to the growers, it became a win-win for everyone involved. Not only did schools receive incredible organic produce, but they also had access to Strauss organic yogurt that had been mislabeled (if regular yogurt is inadvertently put into vanilla containers, for example, it can’t be taken out and put into the correct ones) and other organic products made in Marin. “It’s a way to do two things at once: improve the health of children locally and support the small and medium-sized producers farming sustainably,” he says.
It’s also an opportunity to educate children about where their food comes from and get them involved in the process. Children from the local schools come to a farm as part of Marin Organic’s Farm Day Program and harvest the produce that gets delivered in a biodiesel truck to them a day later. Hellberg says this program could be replicated anywhere, and interest has spanned from Hawaii to the East Coast. During the four years it’s existed, more than 140,000 pounds of free food has been given away, food that otherwise would have been wasted. The program has also returned around $120,000 to farmers through additional regular local food purchases. More than 50 schools participate, which is more than half the public and private schools in Marin. That means 12,000 children have access to healthy, local, organic food every week.
“Combining ecological stewardship and entrepreneurism through new, innovative resource management will let us come up with solutions that are socially just, ecologically sound and economically viable,” says Hellberg. He says that even as a nonprofit, Marin Organic strives to be fiscally self-sustainable.
Hellberg urges companies to continue to expand their responsibility into the social sector, as many already do, because there’s money to be made as ecological stewards. As Marin Organics has proven, there are things we can do collectively that can’t be done individually, which will benefit everyone’s bottom line.
