With offerings like Cowboy Quesadillas and Beef and Noodle Sundaes, the food available to Marysville students today is very different from what was offered to their parents.
That is a good thing for taste buds and the bottom line, according to Marysville Director of Food and Nutrition Lorie Pennington.
She explained the complexities of running the districts breakfast and lunch program to the board of education Thursday night. Better food, better training and better tracking of ingredients were all on the menu in the three years she has led the district food operations.
Pennington said the lunch purchases are running about 4% higher than last year, while breakfast orders are up 9%. The district serves an average of 574 breakfasts and 2,227 lunches each day.
Pennington explained that the number of free and reduced price meal participants has exploded this year, but the issue has more to do with paperwork than a changing population. She said the USDA now automatically enrolls any family eligible for Medicaid in the free and reduced program, where as previously students had to opt-in to the program.
In 2021-22 all students received free meals at school because of the pandemic. The volume and associated supply chain problems left Pennington scrambling to simply find enough food for meals, and even enough disposable trays to serve them on.
Once those issues subsided, Pennington said she began to look at ways to make the food being served more appealing to students, while still meeting strict nutritional guidelines.
Pennington said creating dishes that taste good despite nutritional constraints can be challenging. For example sodium and sugar limits are set to be reduced and whole grain content is being increased from 50 to 80%. She said she has been able to find products that taste good for most grain products, but she can’t find a suitable biscuit that contains 80% whole grain.
“It’s just very dense,” Pennington said.
The food service department changes the food choices each day, offering various stations in some schools. The high school has a station that makes a 7-inch pan pizza and another that focuses on Mexican food offering, both of which are very popular according to Pennington.
She also uses creativity to put new spins on some more traditional foods. The Cowboy Quesadilla is mac and cheese and barbecue pork put in a quesadilla.
The Beef and Noodle Sundae is fashioned to look like a hot fudge sundae, complete with a cherry tomato on top.
Pennington also brings in chefs to help train her staff in various areas, such as seasoning of foods, knife skills or presentation ideas. She said the appearance of the meals can be important in how they sell.
“Everybody eats with their eyes,” Pennington said. “We need to make it look good and we need to make it taste good.”
She said the choices are important because the best selling items vary among schools and grade levels.
Pennington said staffing issues continue to present a challenge, as they do other areas of education. She said she has created a head cook training program and is working to build the substitute lists.
She said food safety is always a top priority and blends technology and training. She said the staff is updated on weekly safety topics.
“I tell my staff and head cooks, food safety is just as important as the bottom line,” Pennington said. “Because we need to make sure we are serving a safe product to our kids.”
After previously taking food temperatures and recording the results on paper, the district now uses digital temperature tracking software to allow additional layers of oversight.
The district has also implemented constant temperature monitoring in freezers and coolers so that staff is alerted instantly if there is a problem with a unit.
To help track the sales of various offerings and minimize food waste, the district instituted menu tracking software that helps with menu planning. The program monitors offerings to ensure the nutritional benchmarks are met and creates forecasts for ordering by tracking consumption of various dishes by the student body.
Pennington said the program also allows to the district to consolidate recipes for dishes among the nine schools. She said recipes were recorded on paper at the individual schools previously.
Streamlining the food ordering and preparation is crucial to holding down costs, as Pennington noted that the price increases being felt by families also exist in the arena of school meals. There are also issues with reductions in federal reimbursement dollars into the program that create obstacles to the operation breaking even.
The $2.5-million operation is currently self sustaining, taking no money from the general fund.