FOODSERVICE OPERATOR OF THE MONTH
Perkins says they also conduct inter- views with students, focus groups, and other proactive outreach, but the quick surveys helped collect lots of useful data without asking too much of a time com- mitment from student diners. COMMISSARY EXPANSION That student feedback helped the team shape their plans for expansion. Not every MMSD school has its own kitchen facility, so they planned to cook more scratch meals at MMSD’s commis- sary that serves as a warehouse, stor- age, and distribution center. They knew it could be the major driving force in spreading scratch-made items much more widely throughout the district, so they planned to make and send meals to the district’s 26 elementary schools starting in the 2025-26 school year that began this fall. This meant many months of planning that included extensive recipe testing, widespread culinary training and up- skilling, and experimentation to ensure dishes maintained their quality even af- ter transportation and reheating. “The training focused on being really detail-oriented in your cooking,” says Shannon Jacobson, a Cook II at MMSD who is French-trained. “If you’re bring- ing in product that comes in a bag, you basically put it in the oven and you’re done. We had to teach mise en place, how to slow down and measure everything out, to know what your plan is before you start to execute it, and how to be consistent every day. Once you start to build the muscle memory, it gets easier.” Training focused on the foundation- al and ran the gamut: how to tempera- ture-check food, learning which items could stay in a cooler longer than others, knife skills, and tips and tricks like using a spoon to de-seed cucumbers quickly. “When you have that part down you can move to more complex skills like tasting, but palette is a little bit more dif- ficult to teach,” Jacobson says. “You get there with experience and time: ‘This
ed challenges were only just beginning to ease. He began with small steps, like bringing back salad “Garden Bars” and sourcing some local produce. By the end of 2023, however, they were ready to begin that culture change. Perkins was awarded a Healthy School Food Pathway Fellowship from the Chef Ann Foundation, a nonprofit that supports scratch-made school meal programs. And the elementary school Nuestro Mundo was a perfect place to start: The school had already offered a limited number of scratch meals prior to the pandemic, it had recently moved buildings so operations were changing anyway, and its principal Josh Forehand was excited about the prospect of serv- ing in-house meals once again. In the beginning of 2024, Nuestro Mundo’s two nutrition employees began
culinary training about how to prepare the new recipes—which came to includ- ing pollo loco chicken drumsticks with cilantro-lime rice and roasted broccoli, honey-ginger tofu that became a sur- prise runaway hit, and lo mein loaded with vegetables. “We started by serving these new things just a couple times a week, and we slowly ramped up as the year went on,” Perkins says. “It wasn’t just about educating our staff, but our students too: Some of them were used to grab- bing these prepackaged trays, and now we were asking them to try things that looked and tasted brand new.” The team solicited feedback from stu- dents in multiple ways. The most com- mon was a quick survey in which stu- dents could simply circle after a meal that they tried it, liked it, or loved it.
QUARTERLY | Q4
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