Fueling learning through nutrition

Julie Holbrook and her school lunch managers are incredibly passionate about food.

That’s because they believe deeply that better nutrition leads to better learning. There’s plenty of data and anecdotal evidence that backs them up, too.

The team behind Co-Ser 642, the Cafeteria Management Co-Ser – now rebranded as NOURISH – focuses on cooking from scratch with the most local, seasonal and natural foods they can source to create meals that students enjoy while also giving them the fuel to get the most out of their school day.

 

How NOURISH works

A NOURISH school lunch manager works with each school district in the Co-Ser, overseeing their cafeteria, guiding chefs and ensuring the meals meet the program’s standards for serving real food.

NOURISH-led cafeterias give students in two meals all the nutrition they need for the day. That way, parents don’t have to worry as much about creating nutritious meals in the evenings. So many parents and caregivers these days are too busy to cook full dinners from scratch, and many can’t afford to keep the fridge full of fresh, nutrient-rich foods.

All cafeterias in NOURISH have a salad bar that gives students a variety of options for fruit and vegetables each day. Students are even encouraged to take unlimited seconds of fruits and veggies, if they are still hungry after their meal.

Cafeteria staff who serve NOURISH meals are encouraged to chat with students, asking what they like and what they don’t like. Each district has its own menus, which allows for flexibility based on the unique culture of that school. Students are encouraged to try food they might not normally take through “try me bites” and taste tests, and staff adjust recipes based on student feedback as well.

 

Why it works

Bagged sauces, instant mashed potatoes, premade soups, canned vegetables, premade frozen foods – these are all staples of a typical cafeteria in public schools across New York. But these processed foods are full of added preservatives, dyes, sodium and sugar.

These additives and carbohydrate-heavy foods can make students sluggish and inattentive, and there are a variety of other concerning long-term impacts.

Once NOURISH is implemented in a school district, the team is used to hearing really positive feedback from staff, families and students. Teachers and administrators see a marked improvement in student behaviors, attention, mood and alertness when they are eating nutrient-dense foods at breakfast and lunch.

“The food program has significantly improved student behaviors in our programs,” one principal told their school lunch manager. “The students generally seem much happier about the quality of the food and the food choices.”

Our NOURISH team often hear that people expect the program to be more expensive for a district than what they are paying for processed and prepackaged food. On the contrary, it’s often quite a bit less expensive to create unprocessed meals – and the savings increase with larger school districts. It turns out to be much more cost-effective to buy real, unprocessed foods and have staff cut the veggies, blend the soups and toss the pasta in house.

For example, pre-made pizza slices can run from 80 cents to $1.27 per slice, while pizza slices made from scratch by the NOURISH team cost 27 cents to make. That kind of savings adds up over the year.

In one school district of about 1,800 students, NOURISH took the cafeteria from losing $135,000 in the 2020-21 school year to a net income of $168,000 in the 2021-22 school year. That includes a 75% growth in the number of meals served – from 158,000 to 276,500 over the school year.

 

Growth of the program

The program stems from when Julie was “an angry PTA mom,” as she says, who wanted better food to be served to her own children at school. Julie had learned through her own health journey how much of an impact nutrition has on health, and she wanted her children to have nutritious meals served to them every day at school so it could help them learn and grow.

She started in a single school district back in 2007, starting small with swaps like using real eggs rather than processed liquid eggs, then eventually moving to making everything in-house. After transforming Keene Central School’s cafeteria, she helped Schroon Lake Central School switch to scratch cooking with local ingredients. In 2015, she came on board at CVES and started to grow the service from there. She now runs a thriving team running 16 kitchens across 8 school districts, serving breakfast and lunch to more than 5,000 students each school day.

The NOURISH school lunch managers are taking the reigns from Julie and running with it. The team is Assistant Food Service Director K’Cee Leavine and School Lunch Managers Jocelyn Lopez (who works with Plattsburgh CSD), Sadie Kaltenbach (Moriah CSD), Barrett Miller (Keene, Schroon, Boquet Valley CSDs and CVES schools), Zach Zarling (Peru) and Shannon Shofner (Willsboro CSD). Michael Piekarski will soon replace Sadie at Moriah. They are passionate about what they do, and they are great ambassadors for the program.

The team is so enthusiastic about what they do that they decided collaboratively to rebrand the Co-Ser to NOURISH, which stands for Nurturing Our Unique Regional Ingredients for Student Health. NOURISH is a powerfully descriptive word that gets to the heart of what they do much more quickly than, “Co-Ser 642: Cafeteria Management.” This isn’t just any cafeteria management program – it’s an innovative approach that focuses on fueling education.

 

Future

The NOURISH team is anxiously awaiting the construction of a 10,000 square foot commissary kitchen that will be part of the new CV-TEC building. This initiative, funded in part by the Local Food Infrastructure Grant, will give them the ability to do large-scale cooking, prep, preservation, storage and distribution, streamlining much of what they’re doing now and adding new capabilities as well.

This is an innovative approach that state officials are watching closely. They hope the commissary kitchen can be an example that can be mimicked around the state.

 

Education about nutrition

Moving to the NOURISH program isn’t always easy for a school district. Feelings about food are deeply engrained in family and community culture, and it’s become common to use processed or sugary foods as treats or rewards for children.

When given the chance to try new and nutrient-rich foods, though, students will zealously grab ahold of the opportunity. Which is great, because beyond just having an impact on a student’s day, the NOURISH team really wants to have a long-term impact, helping students learn how to choose foods that make them feel better and fuel their bodies well as they grow into adults and start to feed their own families.