Single-District Learning Labs: Accomplishments and Lessons Learned

Transcription

1 Single-District Learning Labs: Accomplishments and Lessons Learned School Food FOCUS is a national collaborative that leverages the knowledge and procurement power of large school districts to make school meals nationwide more healthful, regionally sourced, and sustainably produced. With seed funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, FOCUS launched in It works to transform food systems to support students academic achievement and lifelong health, while directly benefiting farmers, regional economies, and the environment. The School Food Learning Lab is a core FOCUS program and the place where FOCUS engages most concretely with school districts on the day-to-day business of buying and preparing food. The heart of the Learning Lab is participatory action research that fully involves food service leaders and their partner organizations in investigation, analysis of new information, and strategizing around select procurement goals. The desired outcome is research based innovation in school food purchasing that has been shown to work real practices that can have local, regional, and national impact. To date, the Lab has collaborated with three FOCUS school districts, beginning with Saint Paul and Denver. The third Lab, currently underway in Chicago, is a significant scale up from the two previous ones, from tens of thousands of meals per day to hundreds of thousands. Together, the three Labs have paved the way for a multi-district, regional Learning Lab that will be launched in the upper Midwest in The larger project will be built upon methods pioneered by the single-district pilots. FOCUS project managers have led research for the first three Labs, with support from academic specialists at the C.S. Mott Group for Sustainable Agriculture at Michigan State University (MSU). Lab outcomes are being tracked and analyzed by FOCUS, MSU, and an evaluation team at University of California, Davis. How the Lab process works Although Learning Labs involve many players, the project structure is straightforward. Food service staff leaders drive decision-making in consultation with a team of FOCUS staff, university-based researchers, and local and national not-for-profit partners. At the outset, each Lab district is asked to identify a spectrum of food-procurement areas where it is having difficulty making improvements on its own. From these initial lists, the consulting team works with the districts to target three to five highpriority goals deemed achievable within the 18 months allotted for each Lab. Once the goals are agreed upon, the FOCUS and university partners make a site visit the first of several to meet with district staff and the district s local partners face to face. The team tours school kitchens and warehouses, eats with students in school cafeterias, and interviews key personnel the

2 food service director, executive chef, head dietician, purchasing officer, and others. Researchers gather baseline purchasing data and begin investigating supply-chain options. Subsequent trips include visits with growers, processors, and suppliers who are doing business with the district or are interested in getting involved. In between visits, the Lab pursues agreed-upon action steps to explore opportunities for change and understand their potential impacts on the district s budget, protocols, and supply-chain relationships. Conference calls, research reports, and regular progress updates keep everyone moving together as the work becomes increasingly complex and some workable avenues towards specific outcomes begin to emerge. Once the 18 months are up, researchers gather and analyze quantitative and qualitative data, focusing on procurement shifts catalyzed by the Lab. They look at the impact that changes have had on the district s budget, on where and how money is spent, and how these changes affect the growers, processors, and distributors that the district does business with. Written reports include case studies, academic journal articles, and how to briefs directed at food service professionals. For a much broader audience, materials are also developed that distill Lab outcomes and how procurement shifts change the food available to students in these districts. Additional data is gathered a year later, and will be gathered again in two to three years after that, in an effort to understand the Lab s long-term impact on the supply chain and the district s spending, practices, and attitudes. Pilot districts progress report The three Lab districts, like all FOCUS member districts, serve a large number of children living at or near the poverty line and thus eligible for free or reduced price meals: 68.5% in Saint Paul (out of 38,938 total), 65.9% in Denver (74,189) and 73.4% in Chicago (421,430) 1. Saint Paul Public Schools (SPPS), SPPS joined the Learning Lab in partnership with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), a Minneapolis-based not-for-profit that works locally and globally at the intersection of policy and practice to ensure fair and sustainable food, farm, and trade systems. SPPS has a sophisticated central kitchen and well-equipped satellite school kitchens, so much was possible. The district ultimately settled on four goals for its Lab: (1) a higher volume and greater diversity of fresh local produce, (2) milk produced without artificial growth hormones and lower in added sugar content, (3) whole grain hamburger, hot dog, and hoagie buns, and (4) locally produced, clean label poultry. Local for this Lab was defined as within a 200-mile radius. The team arrived at this definition via an investigation of regional growing conditions, followed by conversation and consensus. SPPS Lab accomplishments include: A formal bidding process through a Request for Proposals (RFP) for processors to increase the percentage of locally grown produce used in school meals. Direct relationships with growers and transparency with regard to pricing and the nature of farmers business relationships with processors data. 2

3 More local produce in menus (40% of the total between September and December), in greater variety, including items new to school menus such as bok choy. Sugar reduction in flavored milk (rbgh, it turned out, was not used on farms supplying the district s dairy supplier and thus not an issue). Transition from 100 percent white to 53 percent whole grain 2 buns. Locally sourced raw chicken drumsticks cooked from scratch in-house. Impacts on the supply chain include: Direct communication with farmers and produce processors has made it possible for the district to synchronize menu planning with the local harvest. All four dairies that supply milk to Minnesota schools have lowered the sugar in their flavored milk. The national manufacturer that supplies SPPS with its buns has made its 53% whole grain formulation available to schools nationwide. The mid-size producer that sells fresh chicken to SPPS now has a ready local market for drumsticks, which were previously in surplus. Post Lab, there have been more, indirect outcomes as SPPS continues to make progress on its own in each of its goal areas and beyond. Scratch-cooked local chicken now appears on the menu twice monthly, district-wide. The district has created Minnesota Grown educational materials for the lunchroom to educate students about the local food system and where their food comes from. Local produce purchases now include items from a consortium of small-scale Hmong farmers, a relationship that celebrates the presence of the Hmong in the Twin Cities region and the many Hmong children attending SPPS schools. SPPS has also partnered with regional suppliers to introduce dishes made with bison and native wild rice. A case study released in 2010 will be followed up with a report on 2011 circle back data, currently underway. Three SPPS Learnings from the Lab briefs are designed to help other districts adapt the SPPS Lab approach to purchasing improvements in bread, chicken, milk and produce, along with tips for working with vendors. Denver Public Schools (DPS), DPS chose to focus on the regional food system in its Lab. Like SPPS, DPS enjoys the advantage of cooking facilities full kitchens in nearly two-thirds of its 156 schools. This allowed the Lab a generous range of options. Working with a coalition of local partners that included Slow Food Denver, the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, the Colorado Department of Agriculture, and Colorado Farm to School, it developed strategies for expanding its use of regionally grown ingredients through purchasing, school gardening, salad bars, scratch cooking, and local processing. 2 Whole grain, per the FDA definition, refers to formulations that are 51% or higher whole grain by weight. 3

4 Outcomes include: Language that specifies local in produce bid renewal, resulting in purchases of more than $101,000 worth of Colorado-grown fruits and vegetables in More than 7,000 pounds of Colorado-grown organic apples purchased in Sustainably raised Colorado beef and bison introduced to school menus, using recipes developed by Denver culinary-school students and taste-tested by DPS children. Locally processed chili and salsa custom made to district specifications with Colorado-grown ingredients. Purchasing of student-grown produce for school meals, made possible by a garden-tocafeteria food safety protocol developed by Slow Food Denver in cooperation with the local health department. Salad bars introduced to 91 cafeterias feature Colorado-grown items in season; student favorites include roasted butternut squash and a colorful coleslaw accented with spinach and carrot. Staff training for scratch cooking with fresh ingredients, launched in 2011, included bread baking, cold food preparation (for salad bars), safety protocol for handling raw meat, and knife skills. Trainers included community volunteers from Whole Foods and Great Harvest Bread Company. Colorado-grown foods play starring role in monthly Colorado Proud days that promote the regional food system to students. In Denver, senior food service staff are enthusiastic about the culture change that is taking place as union cooks report to work in their crisp new chef coats and students see their own schoolyard cucumbers, beans, corn, and peaches displayed in salad bars. A new friendly Fridays program brings teachers and students together for lunch in school cafeterias. In a post-lab visit to Denver, in April 2011, FOCUS learned about the district s plans for moving forward with work and ideas catalyzed by the Lab. Pilot staff training has been extended to all 600 union kitchen staff. Recipes made with local ingredients include black bean tortilla casserole, chile relleno quiche, and other healthy entrees that tempt children to try something new. A pilot purchase of whole-muscle fresh chicken will be prepared from scratch on site. On the supply side, the processor that DPS has contracted to make chili and salsa a small, Denverbased company specializing in custom formulations for restaurants and institutional food service has expanded its business with other Colorado districts post-lab, and now manufactures a line of lowsodium, clean-label items for schools, including whole wheat tortillas, canned beans, beef taco filling, béchamel sauce, and chicken gravy. The vegetable processor that prepares produce for DPS salad bars is encouraging options for expanding local buying into spring and early winter, using early-harvest sweet spinach in May and June and root vegetables available from cold storage well into February. 4

5 Chicago Public Schools (CPS), CPS, the third largest district in the nation, deliberately selected its Lab goals with an eye to effecting change nationwide. They were: lower-sugar, higher fiber breakfast cereal, lower sodium cheese, and cleaner label chicken. The cheese and chicken goals presented a different kind of challenge to the Lab, as the district uses entitlement spending to source most of its supply in both these areas through USDA Foods. All three goals were chosen to support an ambitious five-year menu-reform plan that calls for dramatic reduction in sodium, fat, and sugar, and stronger emphasis on produce and other whole, fiberrich foods. Additionally, the Lab was asked to investigate a possible purchase of chicken produced without the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics. This work advanced considerably when the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Agriculture (HHIF) joined the project in early Over time, the larger goal for chicken became a standard for schools that is both healthier on the plate (whole muscle, lower sodium, fewer additives) and in the environment (antibiotics are used minimally, safely, and sustainably on the farm). This is consistent with the gold standard for chicken drafted by the FOCUS Chicken Specifications Committee in From the beginning, chicken was seen as the most critical, and most difficult, aspect of this Lab. Like most school districts, CPS has long been reliant on economical nuggets and sandwich patties, formed from chopped or extruded commodity chicken meat bound with textured vegetable protein and additives. Chicken produced to the FOCUS gold standard ideal is prohibitively expensive when purchased pre-cooked. After many months of research and conversation, CPS decided to make a pioneering shift to scratchcooked chicken in all schools equipped with full kitchens. With facilitation from FOCUS, the district was able arrange with the USDA a purchase of frozen raw commodity chicken at a scale previously unheard of in the world of school food. An even larger, open market purchase of raw chicken, locally grown without antibiotics, was negotiated with help from Whole Foods Market. CPS Lab outcomes: Purchases of more than one million pounds of fresh-frozen chicken for the school year included leg quarters direct from the USDA and 602,880 pounds of drumsticks from Indiana Amish farms that do not use antibiotics. Training in safe handling and scratch cooking of raw poultry for union staff in 457 school kitchens. New chicken recipes include TV personality and celebrity chef Rachael Ray s Windy City Chicken. HHIF/FOCUS brief Purchasing Guidelines That Minimize Antibiotic Use in Poultry Production: Recommendations for Schools and Other Institutional Food Service Buyers includes an RFP template. Three new cereals, custom-formulated to meet CPS specifications for lower sugar and higher fiber, were sourced from a mid-size manufacturer that is new to school food service. 5

6 Replacement of conventional processed sliced commodity cheese with a new, lower-sodium formulation, also available through USDA Foods. The debut of Rachael Ray s Windy City Chicken on October 13 gave the CPS Lab considerable momentum in its final months. A glowing news report about this new program on the local NBC affiliate and a supportive mention by Senator Dick Durbin on the editorial page of the Chicago Tribune generated tremendous excitement about the fresh chicken and the district s entire real food agenda. A November press conference to announce the local, antibiotic-free chicken purchase and explain its purpose resulted in national press attention and an invitation from Representative Louise Slaughter (New York) to present the Learning Lab antibiotics awareness work to Congressional staffers and the press in Spring