Dragging School Food into the Computer Age

Modern technology meets school food

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

When she arrived in Boulder in May 2008 to investigate food service in the schools, Beth Collins found that the cooks had to send paper purchase orders to the school system's central warehouse to get the ingredients they needed to cook meals. The nutrition services department and the warehouse had computer systems, but they didn't talk to each other. A nutritionist who wrote menus for the schools entered them by hand on an Excel spreadsheet.

For Collins, who eventually would be tasked with turning Boulder's neglected food service infrastructure into a smooth-running machine, what she first saw there was like stepping into another era. But that's hardly unusual for U.S. schools and especially school food operations. They are at the end of the line when it comes to adopting modern technology. And that helps account for why they have trouble making ends meet under the federally-funded school meals program.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture requires all school districts to maintain meticulous records of all the purchases they make as a way of proving that they have actually made the meals for which they claim federal reimbursements. Collins said she was in a school district in Misssissippi recently where they kept something they called "The Red Book," meaning a ledger in which they recorded all of their purchases with pen and ink.

Boulder schools had installed a food service computer software program called VBOSS but were hardly using it to its full potential, Collins said. In quick order, she began to integrate various meal service functions into the software system, everything from writing menus and processing procurement, to sending work instructions to production kitchens, managing warehouse purchases, keeping inventory and archiving those records required by the USDA. Laborious paper submissions to the federal government turned into streamlined electronic ones.

Computers manage the cafeteria hardware that allows students to pay for their meals using a touchpad instead of cash, identifies and records those who qualify for free and reduced-price meals and keeps a record of everything they purchase. It allows parents to pay for meals with a credit card online. VBOSS can take simple menus and "explode" them into recipes that will feed thousands of children.

"The best thing it does is take orders from 48 school kitchen sites and consolidate those into something the central office can work with," Collins said. "They're big time savers. Otherwise, you'd be shoveling e-mails and paperwork all day. And there's accountability across the board."

Still, Collins said the VBOSS system, for which the Boulder school district pays a $17,000 annual licensing fee, "is something of an antique." But the new and improved version, called OneSource, from Horizon Software in Duluth, Ga., is something the district simply can't afford, she said.

Amy Huff, vice-president of marketing for Horizon, said the upgrade to OneSource is free to existing customers, but often requires an expensive change in computer hardware. The latest features include food safety monitoring that records the temperatures in refrigerators and freezers and will send electronic alerts if a mechanical failure sends temperatures into dangerous territory. An even newer innovation places digital signage in cafeteria lunch lines and gives students nutritional information on the food being served.

The OneSource system can cost less than $2,000 for a single private school, or more than $1 million in the case of Los Angeles, Horizon's biggest customer with some 900 schools. The costs for other large school districts runs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, Huff said.

Horizon counts 720 school districts encompassing some 12,000 individual schools as clients nationwide. Huff said Boulder is in the vanguard of those embracing modern softerware capabilities to improve their food service operations. Most are not even close to being up to speed with current technology. "School districts are slow anyway, and they're even slower in the back of the house behind food services," Huff said.

Ann Cooper, with her insistence on professional management and maximum use of technology, stands out among food service directors, Huff said. "Most schools hire from within. The food services director is a longtime employee, maybe from another department. They don't have nearly the background that Ann Cooper does. She's not at all typical."

In August, Cooper paid to have a Horizon representative teach her new kitchen production crew how to use the system.

"As school food transitions from processed food to scratch cooking whole foods, we need to harness technology to help us control our costs," Cooper said. "From menus and recipes to purchasing and inventoring and from email to spreadsheets, we need to become as efficient as possible. Computer systems are part of the support sytem that will make success a reality."

Photo by Barbara Ann McMonigal

Boulder's New Deep-Dish Vegetarian Enchilada: The Recipe

Brady Dreibelbis, cutting potatoes

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

Most U.S. schools don't worry about recipes for the food they serve: it arrives pre-cooked and frozen from industrial factories. All they have to do is re-heat it and put it out on a steam table.

Under their newly re-constituted meal service, schools in Boulder are serving food that fits the description "home made." Recipes come from a variety of sources: some originated in Berkeley, Calif.,where Ann Cooper and her business partner Beth Collins had their first experience replacing the standard re-heat scheme with meals cooked from scratch in a central kitchen. (They post numerous recipes on their website, Lunchbox.) Other new dishes are suggested by Cooper's staff of professional production chefs. And some of the new items appearing this year in Boulder cafeterias--sloppy joes, jicama slaw, baked potatoes stuffed with cheese and broccoli--were developed by students in a series of "iron chef" competitions.

Brandy Dreibelbis, formerly executive chef for Whole Foods in Boulder, now one of five district managers on the schools food service team, takes the lead in developing new recipes. She typically invites the food service staff to lunch to sample dishes under construction and then conducts tastings with the ultimate judges--the kids themselves. Lately she's been gearing up for the winter season with dishes incorporating hard squashes, such as delicate, butternut and spaghetti squash. She also plans to introduce lightly blanched broccoli and roasted potatoes to the system's salad bars. And last week she began working on a series of soups to take some of the chill off Boulder's snowy days ahead: butternut squash, broccoli-cheese, vegetable-rice, tortilla.

One of Dreibelbis' creations that was being served while I was in Boulder was a deep-dish vegetarian enchilada. It's one thing to come up with a recipe you can serve to a family or a group of friends. It's quite another to translate your culinary musings into a meal for thousands of kids that hits all the right notes. I thought the enchilada was inspired. And Dreibelbis, being a professional chef, also had a number of practical considerations she incorporated into this particular dish.

"We wanted to appeal to our Hispanic population and try something vegetarian other than tofu," said Dreibelbis. "I liked this recipe because it enables us to use several commodity products, such as corn, pinto beans, cheddar cheese, enchilada sauce, and diced tomatoes."

Note that it makes "one hotel pan," meaning enough to feed you and 50 of your friends.

Baked Veggie Enchiladas

2 T Veg Oil

10 oz Yellow Onion, diced

1 lb 6 oz Zucchini, diced

92 oz Pinto Beans

28 oz Diced Tomatoes

32 oz Corn

3 t Cumin

1 T Oregano

1 t Salt

36 Corn Tortillas (6”)

24 oz Enchilada Sauce

26 oz Salsa

1.25 lb Cheddar Cheese, Shredded

6 Cloves Garlic, minced

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Heat oil in skillet over med-high heat. Add onion and garlic. Cook, stirring often until starting to brown, about 5 minutes.

Stir in zucchini, beans, tomatoes, corn, cumin, oregano and salt and cook, stirring occasionally until the veggies are heated through.

Combine enchilada sauce and salsa together and set aside. Reserve 8 fl oz sauce for top layer.

Combine vegetable mix with cheese. Reserve 1 cup cheese for top layer.

The enchilada bake should be layer like lasagna:

Place 12 tortillas in pan. Top with half the vegetable/cheese mix and half the sauce. Repeat with one more layer of 12 tortillas, vegetable/cheese mix and sauce. Add final layer of 12 tortillas, top with remaining 8 fl oz sauce and then the 1 cup cheese. Cover with parchment and foil.

Bake casserole for about 30 minutes.

Remove foil and continue baking until casserole is bubbling around the edges and cheese is melted, about 10 more minutes

Not Quite Cooked from Scratch...Yet

Lunch: Penne pasta with salad, cottage cheese

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

Ann Cooper warned me that I might see some unusual things in the school kitchens on my visit to Boulder. I did.

One morning at Casey Middle School, five-pound bags of what looked like frozen cookie dough lay on a stainless work table. In fact, labels described the contents as chicken gravy. Not your typical institutional gravy, processed in some distant factory with 50 industrial additives, however. No, this chicken gravy—destined to make hundreds of portions of chicken pot pie for Boulder school children--came from a family-owned company less than an hour away in Denver and was made according to Ann Cooper’s precise instructions.

Ready Foods, established in 1972 with Mexican cuisine in mind, now specializes in custom-formulated “kettle” products for restaurant chains, meaning just about anything that can be cooked in a 200-gallon commercial kettle. Chinese, Italian, Mexican—Ready Foods covers it all, says owner Marco Abarca. Yet until Ann Cooper came along, he had never considered schools as a potential customer.

“I always thought school business was something I would never go after because it’s so heavily bureacratic,” Abarca said. “It seems to be all about low quality, low price. And that’s not something I want to be in.”

But for Cooper, who is all about cooking school food from whole ingredients without the additives, Ready Foods was a perfect fit. She could tell Abarca exactly what she wanted in her chicken gravy--known as veloute in chef circles--meaning none of those emulsifiers, stabilizers, flavor-enhancers and preservatives whose names you can't pronounce. After visiting the factory with her business partner, Beth Collins, Cooper now sends Abarca the government commodity beef she earns selling meals in the national school lunch program to turn into chili and taco filling. In his 85,000-square-foot food factory, Abarca makes the béchamel sauce for Boulder schools’ macaroni and cheese.

What’s happening in Boulder offers a rare glimpse into the carefully choreographed steps that must be taken to accomplish radical change in a large school district's food service. Cooper has unveiled an all-new menu and hired a new staff of professional chefs and kitchen managers to cook meals in five newly outfitted production kitchens. While the cooks get their legs in the new digs, Cooper devises ways to remain true to her belief in unadulterated food.

It's a work in progress, and the details are almost unfathomably complex.

Defrosting 5-pound bags of chicken gravy...

Yields chicken pot pie for lunch

Frozen taco filling...

Becomes Monday's nachos

Cooper writes her school menu for the entire year months in advance. The commodity food products she uses--beef, chicken, pasta, cheese, beans--must be ordered from the federal government a year ahead of time. To coordinate ingredients, menus and production details, Cooper and Collins create a giant Excel spreadsheet listing menu items and recipes Collins has devised that can "explode" from a basic formula into servings for thousands of kids.

They then examine each day's menu and calculate how the meals will be assembled, the staffing needs, the equipment required. For instance, a roast chicken thigh on the menu means the production kitchens will need sheet pans on which to cook the thighs and ship them to outlying schools. How many thighs fit on a sheet pan? How many sheet pans are needed? How many sheet pans fit on the rolling racks the kitchens use to transport the roasted thighs? And how many rolling racks will fit on one of Cooper's delivery trucks?

All of that might affect the next day's menu selection as well: there could be a problem if sheet pans were needed again and they had not been returned from the schools to the production kitchens.

"Sometimes a menu choice might change depending upon what equipment is needed and whether you have the refrigerator space and the capacity to ship it," said Cooper. "And where are we going to store all the sheet pans when we aren’t using them?"

Cooper continued: "There’s a lot of complexity to it because it’s not just about how to cook the chicken. Without some kind of owners manual, it’s really hard to figure out how to do it. Unless you have a very strong background, it’s very hard to get your arms around all these pieces."

One of Cooper's district managers, Brandy Dreibelbis, scans the menus and the recipes and writes the "prep lists"--the work that needs to be done on any given day--for an entire month and for all five of the system's production kitchens. Cooper wants to know that all of her production cooks are doing the same thing on any given day. Anything she can do streamline and economize potentially saves money that can be used to improve the quality of the meals she serves. It also takes pressure off her employees, who are still getting used to the new system in Boulder.

In Berkeley, where Cooper also revamped the school meal service, the central kitchen makes something I call “epic chicken,” meaning the 1,400 pounds of chicken parts that arrive courtesy of the federal government frozen in 40-pound blocks. They require days--and quite a bit of room in the central kitchen facility--to defrost, marinate, sort, roast, package and ship to the district's schools.

To eliminate some of the hassle, Cooper in Boulder buys commercially prepared chicken thighs that are quick-frozen individually so they can easily be poured out of a bag and placed on a roasting pan, a method she wishes the U.S. Department of Agriculture would adopt.

Those chicken thighs taste awfully good next to a side of freshly mashed potatoes. I was also taken with a barbecued chicken sandwich made with diced chicken that arrives cooked and frozen from Gold Kist Farms. In fact, frozen foods show up in some surprising places. The frozen corn on the salad bar is nothing new, nor are the frozen peas. But would you believe frozen hard-boiled eggs to spoon over your salad? If one of the cooks hadn't told me, I would never have known.

Cooper puts out 10,000 meals a day--2,500 breakfasts and 7,500 lunches--and despite the difficulties of implementing so many changes in a relatively short period of time, and the many products she's out-sourced rather than cooking from scratch, she's managed to keep ingredient costs to $1.13 per meal, not terribly higher than the national average of around $1.

"That's a testament to Beth’s ability at procurement, but also testament to our ability to manage waste and product," Cooper said. "It’s a big, big job. People say, 'God, you have so many managers!' But you have to have managers to manage all your costs. We’re spending a couple million dollars on food, so we have to manage it correctly."

Bags of frozen diced chicken...

Turns into a yummy barbecue sandwich

Kids, meanwhile, don't care about management, and they may still need some convincing where healthier foods are concerned. They're nostalgic for the good old days of processed convenience foods. They miss their chicken nuggets and Subway sandwiches and even the miniature pancakes that were served re-heated inside their plastic packaging. A Boulder lunch menu from April 2005 lists macaroni and cheese, hamburgers, hot dogs, mini-pancakes with sausage and the ever-popular pizza. There were chicken nuggets, nachos, a beef rib sandwich, cheese sticks and a soft pretzel with cheese sauce. They still talk about the "French toast sicks" that were served as a lunch item.

"On Friday I saw 10 kids with microwavable meals in the cafeteria," said Michelle Hancock, a production cook at Casey Middle School. And since the schools serve only plain, low-fat organic milk from dispensers under Cooper--no more cartons of chocolate or strawberry--some kids bring their own chocolate syrup from home to squeeze into the milk, Hancock said.

Cooper's menu contains many kid-friendly items that sound very similar to those on the old menu. But they've all been redesigned to be healthier. Hamburgers, for instance, are served on a whole wheat bun. Pizzas are made in-house using a frozen, commercial crust with fresh-made sauce. Nachos are made with grated real cheese, not the canned, DayGlo stuff full of industrial additives. Some kids have complained the new food doesn't have enough flavor. Coopers chefs continually tweak the recipes.

"Last year we cheated," said Margaret Trevarton, the head "lunch lady"--or "kitchen satellite lead"--at Columbine Elementary School. "I was adding spices to the food, like garlic in the macaroni and cheese."

Cheeseburgers get whole wheat buns

One morning my assignment was to help stuff 800 cheese quesadillas at Monarch High School. They couldn't have been simpler. Whole-wheat flour tortillas were laid out on a metal surface. A filling of grated cheddar cheese mixed with tomato salsa had already been mixed in a huge plastic tub, or Lexan. A cook laid a firm scoop of filling on each tortilla and I followed, spreading the cheese over half the tortilla with my fingers, folding the tortilla in half to cover the cheese. It was pleasant, meditative work. No one was having a heart attack--no barking in this kitchen.

For November, the Boulder menu called for nachos, pizza, chicken pot pie, pasta Bolognese, roast chicken, tacos, hots dogs and a shepherd's pie that so far has failed to light a spark in the student population. As the staff settles in, Cooper plans to cook more of the food from scratch. And as cold weather approaches, something new will appear in Boulder's cafeterias: hot soup.

Making cheese quesadillas

Cooper needs an additional 1,000 kids, approximately, to eat the meals district-wide to balance a $360,000 deficit in her food service operation. About 5,000 of the kids who regularly participate in the meal program eat free or at a reduced price based on family income. That means Cooper so far is reaching only 15 percent of kids who can afford to buy their own lunch. Here's the good news: Cooper still has 85 percent of the full-price student population from which to draw the customers she needs. So far this year, Cooper says she's on target.

Next: Why Ann Cooper believes every school cafeteria should have a salad bar.

Why I Want to be A Professional School Cook

Guest Post

By Margaret Hancock

As a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, I could not be more proud to be putting my degree towards helping to better feed and better educate children about food.

While a culinary student, I heard several lectures about Chef Ann’s work in Berkeley schools and I knew that somehow I was going to get involved. Nearing graduation, I yearned to return to my college town of Boulder and, as fate would have it, Ann was in the process of starting up a new program in the schools there. It has taken two years and lots of persistence to finally get my clogs in the door and I have never been happier than I am working as a production cook at Boulder’s Monarch High School.

School cafeterias were a disgrace when I was a kid and to see them become even worse through the proliferation of fast food is simply wrong. Jamie Oliver has referred to America’s cafeterias as child abuse and sadly he’s right. You rarely see teachers enjoying their lunch in your child’s cafeteria and that’s because they wouldn’t dare put what is being served in their bodies. So why should kids? This has to be changed one school at a time. What we are doing in Boulder is demolishing the stigma of the school cafeteria.

The fact is, schools need educated and skilled individuals to help them towards change and I am pleased to be one of them. One criticism I continually hear is that schools shouldn’t tell children how to eat. In my opinion, there are children who aren’t learning about proper food choices at home and school is the one place they get a healthy meal. A child cannot begin to comprehend math and English without a proper breakfast and lunch to get their minds going. Children in Boulder are exposed to seasonal, fresh, and organic ingredients, and while this is incredible it needs to be happening everywhere. There is no better place to start addressing America’s weight-related health problems that with our youth.

Every child should have the opportunity to learn where her food comes from and how to make proper food choices. Serving kids organic food is useless if they don’t have an idea what the term organic means. Food knowledge is essential and needs to be fostered in the classroom as well as in the lunchroom. Just as every school should have a playground, it should also have a garden to teach kids the origins of their food. If kids are taught these things at the school level, we can begin to combat childhood obesity and all the adverse health effects that come with this disease.

The menu changes that have happened in Boulder are huge, but I would love to see things taken even further. For me, Ann Cooper’s school food project in Boulder is an incredibly rewarding experience and brings a smile to my face every day. I hope to gain as much knowledge as I can from the Boulder food project and someday move on to help another district in need of change.

Margaret Hancock is a production cook at Monarch High School in Boulder, Colorado.

Kids Make Potato-Kale Soup

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

The simplest soup is also the best.

Our food appreciation classes this week left Africa and landed in Portugal where we set to work making a classic potato and kale soup called caldo verde. Kids love this soup, so add it to your list of recipes that encourage kids to eat vegetables, in this case very healthy and seasonal kale.

In Portugal, market vendors use a machine to chop the kale into a very fine julienne. Otherwise, this soup is incredibly simple with just five ingredients: potatoes, onion, kale, water and salt. A slice of fried linguica sausage is recommended to garnish the soup. We used kielbasa.

To make the soup, peal five medium-sized boiling potatoes such as Yukon Gold and cut into 1-inch pieces. Finely chop 1 onion. Place the potatoes and onion in a heavy pot with six cups of water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and cook until potatoes are tender.

Meanwhile, trim the stems and tough ribs from 8 ounces of fresh kale, then slice the leaves into fine julienne about two inches long.

When the potatoes are done, there are two ways you can proceed. The original recipe we used called for pureeing the contents of the soup pot, then adding it back to the pot along with the julienned kale and cooking about five minutes until the kale is tender. Since we do not use electric gadgets in our classes, we strained the potatoes and onion from the pot and ran them through a food mill. We cooked the kale in the potato cooking water, then stirred the potato mixture back into the pot. Yet another alternative is to use an electric food processor instead of the food mill, which will result in an even creamier soup.

Season the soup with salt to taste and distribute into warm bowls. Add a 1/4-inch slice of fried sausage to each bowl for garnish. Kids will ask for seconds on the sausage, but we only give it to them when they've finished the soup--including the kale.

Not Your Momma's Lunch Ladies

Ali Metzger, left, and Margaret Hancock: happy to be feeding kids

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

I was happily stuffing cheese quesadillas at Boulder's Monarch High School one morning when a perky young woman in a crisp white shirt, natty black apron and spiffy billed cap extended a paper container filled with freshly mashed potatoes in my direction.

"Taste this!" she said. "Do you think they have enough salt? I'm not sure they have enough salt."

In fact, they did need a little salt...But wait! Who was this person, and what was she doing in a school kitchen? Weren't "lunch ladies" supposed to be old and gnarly and wear hair nets?

Turns out her name is Margaret Hancock, a recent graduate of the elite Culinary Institute of America, and she'd spent a good part of the last two years pestering Ann Cooper for a job cooking in the Boulder schools.

"I've been trying to get my foot in the door since the program began," Hancock said.

Nearby was Hancock's co-worker, Ali Metzger. She, too, was a CIA graduate. "I was joking that if people at the CIA knew Ann Cooper was advertising jobs on Craig's List, they'd be all over it," Metzger quipped.

News flash, Ali: They already are all over it. There are two CIA externs waiting to move to Boulder as we speak.

As I discovered during my week in Boulder school kitchens, Cooper not only is remaking the food service in area schools, ditching junk food for meals cooked fresh, she's also created a parallel culinary universe where newly trained chefs forgo a glamorous career in fancy restaurants in order to mash potatoes for teenagers.

"When I first applied, Ann said I was too young," said Hancock, who sports degrees in business and culinary arts. So Hancock went off to run a bagel shop in Denver, but kept calling and calling until Cooper gave in. "It's a way for me to do something meaningful. This is the first job I've ever had where I walk out the door at the end of the day and no matter how many hours I work, I feel good about it."

Even the sous chef who runs the kitchen at Monarch High has caught the fever. Yuri Sanow, a professional chef of many years experience, was working at the Black Hawk Casino when he saw an ad Cooper posted on Craig's List. He gave up a hefty annual bonus to pull up stakes and come work in Boulder.

"All I was doing was making millions of dollars for a big corporation," said Sanow. "Here, I feel like I'm making a difference."

Yuri Sanow, making a difference

Before you imagine a trend sweeping the school food landscape, know this: These people have no interest in slinging corn dogs and tater tots. They're only here because Cooper, in her makeover of Boulder's school menu, determined that what the schools needed desperately was a handful of production kitchens manned by trained chefs to make meals for the entire district. The chef's jackets, aprons and monogrammed caps reading "School Food Project" are all intended to project a sense of order, competency and professionalism. In Boulder, lunch ladies never had a uniform before.

Sarah, who asked not to be identified by her last name, was a sous chef at an upscale Boulder restaurant who wound up in a school kitchen as a parent volunteer. But she was soon ready to quit after she saw the stuff the schools were serving as food. "They said, 'Hang in there. Ann Cooper's coming.' And they gave me a copy of her book." Sarah now directs the meal service at Casey Middle School.

Prior to Cooper's arrival, food was being prepared by those very same lunch ladies in 22 of Boulder's 48 schools. Eleven kitchens made food for multiple schools. Eleven prepared meals only for individual schools. The cooks involved were minimally skilled. They received virtually no training or oversight. Cooper cringes to think of all the waste and inefficiency involved. In her ideal world, she would consolidate all of the district's cooking into one central facility where everything could be managed to a fare-thee-well.

A central kitchen that size, she said, would probably cost $10 million and require voters to approve a bond measure. And that is precisely her objective.

Now in her second year of the makeover, Cooper has reduced the number of production kitchens to five and hired a busload of eager chefs--some young and starry-eyed, like Hancock and Metzger, others older and more experienced, like Sanow--to prepare the food. Henceforth, the lunch ladies would only re-heat and serve it.

Why didn't Cooper just train the lunch ladies to do the job? "We have our hands full just making sure they re-heat the food properly and don't cook it to death," explained Cooper. "They just don't have the skill sets for the level of food preparation that's required. Thirty-five to 40 percent of them didn't know how to use e-mail. Forty percent don't know how to open a document on the computer. You need professionals in some capacity if you're going to change a system of this size."

The great kitchen re-alignment started with a simple formula: 20 meals for every hour worked. That's the production level Cooper would aim for and it spelled bad news for the lunch ladies. In order to accommodate the new production teams--five district managers, each managing eight or nine schools, five sous chefs, and assistants such as Metzger and Hancock for each sous chef--hours would have to be cut elsewhere.

From the lunch lady budget covering all 48 schools, Cooper slashed 265 daily work hours. "For people who were working eight yours, that meant they were working 6.5. People who were working five hours, they wnet to four. Fours hours is now three; three hours is now two," Cooper said. "We lost a couple of people and a few people thought it was time to retire. But at the end of the day, anyone who wanted to work had a job."

The entire kitchen staff, meaning all those lunch ladies, works part-time. And, yes, some work as few as two hours per day for wages that start at $10.61 an hour. If they make it to "step 7," they could look forward to $14.81 an hour. That compares to a pay range of $13.64 to $18.59 an hour for production cooks. Sous chefs who run the production kitchens earn "around $40,000" Cooper said.

According to one published report, some of the kitchen staff now complain that they have to work hours off the clock to complete their assignments.

To get everyone on the same page, Cooper in the first year of the program--fall 2009--spent some $200,000 in privately donated funds for a week's worth of training for the entire kitchen staff. That meant more than 150 employees took the ServSafe course in food sanitation. Two long-time collaborators of Cooper flew in from California to teach basic kitchen skills: how to re-heat and serve food, how to use a thermometer, how to use knives, how to set up and break down salad bars, how to manage a cash register. There were team-building exercises with a local coach. Cooper and her business partner, Beth Collins, also gave instruction.

This year, in August, Cooper spent another $75,000 training her new production crew, giving basic training in how the Boulder system works, familiarizing them with recipes, how to pack and ship food. A software representative came in to explain a new system for integrating recipes, productions schedules and inventory.

"If you’re going to make these changes sustainable and systemic you have to fund training," Cooper said. "You have to train your people and give them the tools to succeed."

Brandy Dreibelbis: Likes the team spirit

One of the five new district managers is Brandy Dreibelbis, who gave up a job as executive chef for Whole Foods in Boulder to lock arms with Cooper.

Originally from Delaware with a degree in hotel and restaurant management, Dreibelbis had spent years working a frantic pace in restaurants when she took a flyer and applied for a job with Whole Foods. She landed in Boulder, and within six months had the top kitchen job. She liked the new lifestyle, too: formerly a beach girl, she climbs mountains, skis, hikes in winter on snow shoes. But after two years as executive chef, she found few options to advance and continue cooking. Meanwhile, she'd seen numerous reports about changes happening in Boulder's cafeterias. Whole Foods was raising money for the project.

"I went in for an interview and left feeling a little unsure about venturing into something so different food-wise than what I had known, and I wasn't sure if I was really ready to leave Whole Foods," Dreibelbis said. "I came back to work from a day off and all of a sudden I was surrounded by posters and advertisements for healthy school lunches and pictures of Ann at work. I thought this was probably a sign."

“I took this job because I wanted to be a part of something that is truly important and I wanted to make a difference,” Dreibelbis said. “I wanted to get in on this project and have a part in a model that any district could pick up and learn from.”

Not only did Dreibelbis take the job, she started poaching talent from among her former underlings at Whole Foods. That would include Ali Metzger and Margaret Hancock's twin sister, Michelle, who works as a production cook at Casey Middle School. She took a pay cut to leave Whole Foods.

"I never had a job before where I was giving back," Michelle Hancock explains. "It's rewarding to see the kids eating the food and raving about it. One day I bumped into a mom in the parking lot and she talked to me for half an hour about how much she loves what we're doing and now she wants to get involved, too."

Hancock's supervisor, Sous Chef Phil Stinar, a onetime Army cook, was recruited by an old colleague in the restaurant business who also had signed on with Cooper as a district manager. With 25 years of corporate kitchen work under his belt, Stinar has been around: regional manager for Applebee's, eight years at Cheesecake Factory, a stint at Rock Bottom Brewery. He likes the mellower pace of a school chef.

Phil Stinar: Not a lunch lady

"I love this work," he said. "The pace is set by me. We produce a really good product. Some of my friends in the business have asked me, 'Why do you want to be a lunch lady?' I tell them I'm not a lunch lady. I run a production kitchen."

Next: The new food in Boulder schools. It's not quite cooked from scratch...yet.

The Many Faces of Ann Cooper

Ann Cooper's latest book

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

Ann Cooper is involved in so may different activities and is branded in so many different ways it's sometimes hard to know where one starts and another ends without a program. Here's an organizational chart of sorts to explain the multi-faceted world of one very busy school food reformer.

Long before she started serving school food, Cooper was already an accomplished chef and author. A 1979 graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, Cooper cooked in restaurants, on cruise ships and as a caterer in a mountain resort. Her first book, A Woman's Place is in the Kitchen: The Evolution of Women Chefs, was published in 1997. While executive chef at the Putney Inn in Putney, Vt., Cooper published an overview of contemporary food issues titled, Bitter Harvest: A Chef's Perspective on the Hidden Dangers in the Food We Eat and What You Can Do About It.

Cooper's introduction to school food occurred at the private Ross School in East Hampton, New York, when she was recruited by restaurateur and sustainable food advocate Alice Waters to undertake a major overhaul of cafeteria operations in Berkeley, Calif. Beth Collins, a chef and school food consultant from Traverse City, Mich., also worked at Ross School and succeeded Cooper as executive chef there briefly, but soon left to join Cooper in Berkeley. When Cooper and Collins were asked to perform a feasibility study for re-desigining food service in Boulder, they formed a company called Lunch Lessons--the same name as the title of Cooper's latest book--to consult on and implement the project.

Lunch Lessons was paid around $100,000 by the Boulder Valley School District to perform the feasibility study. The company is now working on its third annual contract with the district--$28,000 per month last year, $18,000 per month this year--and Cooper shares in the profits, in addition to the $89,000 salary she draws from the BVSD. The Lunch Lessons website is where Cooper posts her bio and contact information, along with school recipes developed by Collins and a "tool kit" designed to help others improve the food in their schools.

In school food circles, Cooper is treated like a rock star. She travels widely giving talks on the subject. She is constantly in demand by the mainstream media for opinions on school food issues--and she has no problem giving them. As nutrition services director for Boulderr schools, Cooper maintains an office near the buttoned-down front of school district headquarters just outside of town with a stunning view of the mountains. One secret to her success seems to be, Don't waste time sleeping.

Collins, meanwhile, plays the silent, but potent, partner who stays mostly in the background, getting things done. "I'm the heavy lifter person and it works out very well," Collins said.

She works out of a separate office near the maintenance operations at the rear of the school district facility. There, you are apt to bump into burly men in Carhartt overalls in the hallways. The stillness of the computer lab is sometimes interrupted by the sound of power tools interacting with large metal objects.

Cooper said Lunch Lessons gradually is winding down its work in Boulder as it builds a revamped and beefed up nutrition services organization. Collins' work, she said, will probably be finished by spring.

While working in Boulder, Cooper also formed a partnership with Whole Foods that led to an ongoing effort to raise funds to install salad bars in schools nationwide. To oversee that project, Cooper established a non-profit group called F3: Food, Family, Farming Foundation. Collins serves as executive director, while the day-to-day operations are handled by Barbara Ann McMonigal, a Culinary Institute of America graduate and former line cook at The Green Zebra restaurant in Chicago. McMonigal also manages the foundation's website--The Lunchbox--which looks very much like Cooper's Lunch Lessons site and presents numerous menus, recipes and other tools for improving school food service and, of course, setting up salad bars.

A third person--Sunny Young--is paid jointly by the school district and a grant from the Colorado Health Foundation to coordinate interns and parent volunteers who conduct tastings and otherwise promote Cooper's new menu in Boulder schools.

But Cooper says that if something comes up that needs to be done in the schools, Collins, McMonigal or Young will jump in to help regardless of who actually employs them. "That's the way we work," she said.