[Darin Dewiler] Hey, thanks for joining us, everyone. This is another episode of Spoiler Alert! I'm Dr. Darin Dewiler.
[Callin Godson-Green] I'm Callin Godson-Green.
[Darin Dewiler] And we are in Charlotte, North Carolina at the School Nutrition Association's annual conference.
[Callin Godson-Green] Yes, indeed.
[Darin Dewiler] And we're not alone. We're joined by someone from Colorado. And who are you?
[Lindsay Hull] Hi, so my name is Lindsay Hull. I am the Nutrition Services Director for Mapleton Public Schools. It's located a little bit north of Denver, Colorado in the unincorporated part of the northern part of Denver. So our district is about 6,500 students. We serve about 4,500 lunches a day, a little less for breakfast. And I've been there for about 11 years. So since being there, we have implemented a lot of chef-driven operational projects to try to enhance our scratch cooked food items that we offer, a lot more variety of salad bar and that kind of thing.
[Darin Dewiler] Thank you for joining us. And you mentioned salad bar. I don't even think we had a salad bar my entire time when I was in school.
[Callin Godson-Green] Didn't have salad bars in restaurants.
[Darin Dewiler] So much diversity in the foods. I would imagine you have a lot of variety in terms of some locally, either immediately local or at least within your state foods as well.
[Lindsay Hull] Absolutely. So salad bar is a big thing for us. I find that it's very important to offer students choice. I feel like they're more likely to take a fruit or vegetable if they're given a variety of choices. So we have several of the kind of tried and true items, the lettuce, the carrots, the cucumbers that we offer daily. But in addition to that, thanks to a local grant that we have, a local foods grant that we have in the state of Colorado that pass under Healthy School Meals for All, we're able to offer even more local products that are grown and harvested in the state of Colorado. We have some that come as close as about 100 miles away within a small vicinity and then as far as the corner of the state. So we get things like local melons. We have tomatoes that we receive, we can get local cucumbers. We do receive hot house lettuce, and we can do that variety year round, which is exciting. But a lot of our big showcase of local products comes in the beginning of the school year. So we take peaches and apples and things that our farmers in our beautiful, wonderful state are actually growing and then harvesting. So we have partnerships with a lot of local groups. We even get local raw ground beef that we can take into our, we have a production kitchen and our chef is able to cook all of that down and we provide that into our meal service. So we have a lot of locally grown and processed items that we're super proud to serve that people in our own state have used their own hands to grow and make and then we're able to serve those to our kids.
[Darin Dewiler] Do you think they know? Do you think you advertise this? You say, oh, it's locally.
[Lindsay Hull] Yeah, that's a great question. Yes, we do. We try very hard to let our students know that we are getting food that is able to be picked at peak ripeness. It gives that fruit, those fruits and vegetables the highest nutrient density that they could have because they are not having to be picked early and then shipped across the country. So we are very excited when we get these peaches that you bite into that and it is a juicy, yummy, delicious, beautifully, you know, beautiful pear or peach or whatever. So we're excited to be able to do that and we definitely try to showcase that to our students.
[Darin Dewiler] Well, I imagine it's definitely a value add. I mean, you know, or it seems like this was after the season or the bottom of the barrel kind of foods. So it would seem like, oh, I'm being treated like a special student because I get these special meals, these special ingredients. And I would imagine you're also communicating that to the families because they're going to want to make sure that when we send our kids to school that this is the experience they get.
[Lindsay Hull] Absolutely. So we pride ourselves on our chef driven meal operation. We want parents to know what their kids are eating every day. And so we have an online menu that is available to all of our families, but we also have in the line, the lunch line, we have a menu board. And so we are showcasing in big, bold letters, local, so that way they know that is the opportunity to eat something that was grown just down the road.
[Callin Godson-Green] Do you find, this is something I was just thinking about there, after, so say you have something for the first time, you add to the menu, it's a bit of a risk, you're like, let's see how this goes down. Afterwards, what do you do with the information? Like, do you think about or calculate tally, like, oh, we served 1000 portions of this or none of this? Like, does that feedback kind of feed in? Like, oh, no one wanted spaghetti bolognese today because we had this other option that was there. You know, do you take that information into consideration when you're making choices and menu planning and things like that for the kids.
[Lindsay Hull] Absolutely. It's always about feedback, right? So a lot of the feedback is we do testing ahead of time. So a lot of our product is vetted, especially the things that we're taking time to scratch cook. For example, we have a chicken and rice soup that we do, and we actually go all the way back to creating the base. So we stock recipe all the way through to where it's in final cooking at the school. So when we do those kinds of things and we're investing in that kind of time and energy into making something, we want to make sure that the kids are going to accept it. So testing is part of it. Then from there, we implement it across our district. Then we look at how did it go the first time. And then we wait until the second time because the first time is just exposure. And the first time is also for those students that try it, they get to sample it. The real question is who comes back for it? Exactly. And then from there, we may pare down either, we need to make more or we need to make less, or maybe we need to rethink what this looks like, or what about it is not as attractive as we thought it would be, or this is great, we need to amp up our production on this certain item. We definitely take into account what our students are taking and what the trends are. We do try to look at current trends out in the restaurant world to see what are some things that we know kids are going out and seeing in a restaurant and can we somehow duplicate that and still meet our child nutrition program requirements.
[Darin Dewiler] Mind blowing, because I'm thinking back to when I was in elementary school and I swear we didn't have all the menu boards because if it was Monday, it's this. If it was Tuesday, it was this. there was always the little square of pizza or the hamburger or whatever it was. And it was the same exact menu items every day, all year after year after year. But you're talking about so many different, not only food ingredients, but recipes. I would imagine that beyond the communication, there's also the challenges in terms of, well, now we have to hold this at this temperature, we have to track this information about it, we had to deal with these allergens. Talk a little bit, if you would, about It's great to be explorative with new ingredients, but it's also a challenge, I would imagine, in terms of what do we have to do to make sure it's safe.
[Lindsay Hull] Absolutely. So safety is the number one concern and safety is our number one priority. I always say safety comes number one, customer service is #2, right? So, you know, you have to make sure that you are first and foremost, we are protecting our students' health and mitigating any risks or as many risks as we possibly can to ensure that we're serving safe food. So a lot of that comes down to our staff. We have a great staff of people. We train them not only at the beginning of the year on several practices, but ongoing throughout the school year. We do a lot about documentation. So it's always document, document, document. If you didn't write it down, it didn't happen. So we talk a lot about how to make sure that along the entire food chain, right, that from receiving to storage to preparation to cooking to holding to the end of holding to at the very end of the day, where are all of our temperatures and did we make sure that we followed all of those processes? We also make sure that our own equipment is at the proper temperature. So we get alerts anytime that any of our coolers or freezers are out of the normal temperature range. I tend to go on the lower side of those just to make sure I am the first one to know if there is a 0.1 degree over what it should be, right? So we really try to make sure that all of our staff, every single person in that kitchen is trained, knowledgeable, and is ensuring that students remain safe at all times. So that really goes a lot to what we do with our special diets as well. We have a lot of students that have a lot of different needs. So we make sure that in our protocol that we not only write a very precise list of what they can and can't have. We make a menu for them. We establish a protocol. And then we do one-on-one trainings with our staff to buy the student just to make sure that everyone's on the same page. And then we also work very closely with our nursing staff to make sure that they understand how our processes work for different students that might have higher needs than others, just so we can make sure everyone stays safe.
[Darin Dewiler] Now, earlier when we were talking, you were sharing how probably the most important ingredient in your training is the why. Talk a little bit, if you would, about what do you mean by the why and how does that play out in your training?
[Lindsay Hull] That's a great question. So, I feel like if you tell someone, Hey, I need you to do this. If they don't understand why they should be doing that, they may not be as invested in making sure that they do that. So if you explain and talk about why you should be doing something, this is a directive here, it's like, I'm gonna ask you to make sure that when you receive food, that you're receiving cold food at or below 41 degrees. Well, the reason why is because if you accept it at a higher temperature, it is possible that there has been an introduction of bacteria that could have maybe grown more in that temperature danger zone. So that's a lot of why we make sure that everyone understands the why behind it. And in our menus, in our recipes, in a lot of our protocol, our hazard analysis protocol, we make sure that all of those temperatures are documented so that there's no guessing game. It's how much, how do I need to cook this temperature of this, you know, chicken stock or chicken soup recipe or whatever. It says right in the recipe what it needs to be so that there's no guessing game, there's no assumptions. It is prescribed right there following our food safety management protocol.
[Darin Dewiler] I think that that's a really important point, especially because there's so much of the focus on education is the students, but the staff who is responsible for, in this case, the food and making sure that it's not only nutritious and healthy, but also safe. We have to make sure that we're always training and updating because, I mean, as we're recording this, everyone's talking about Cyclospora and this ingredient or that ingredient and why this ingredient is being removed from that restaurant or whatever. And so, but six months ago we were not talking about this topic. And so, there's all these evolving challenges and I think that the why becomes a moving target, if you will.
[Lindsay Hull] Absolutely. And I think we use, there's case studies that are listed in our ServSafe book. When you look at food safety outbreaks, a lot of times it really just stems down to the person who was in charge of that food did not do something right. The protocol was there. They didn't wash their hands. They didn't change their gloves. They didn't get a new cutting board. They didn't sanitize their workstation. Whatever it is, if you follow all of these food safety requirements, then your odds of having an outbreak at your hands very slim. So it's a matter of making sure that people understand that when you cut a corner, there's a big, huge potential ramification to that. And again, we're all here to serve our kids. The most important thing we can do is keep them safe. That's why we all work in this industry. We love kids. We want to keep kids safe. We want to feed them. We want to wrap our arms around giving them all of these wonderful things and giving them an essential part of their day to help them go learn. That's our So if we do something that jeopardizes that by not putting them first, then we are not doing our job. So that's a big thing for me. I'm a big advocate for we always think about what's best for the kids. And if you're not thinking about that, then this isn't the right job for you. It's got to be about what is best for the kids. And that's what we always are trying to really think about. Anytime we're introducing new products, we're talking about introducing new training opportunities, we always make sure that we've got the food safety piece nailed down and it is very clear what is expected and how to best do that to keep our kids safe.
[Darin Dewiler] Well, thank you very much, Lindsay, and thank you for what you do. Again, I think that making sure that our children and schools are as safe as possible. The whole purpose of school is to, have a safe learning environment to kind of prepare for the future. And the last thing you want to do is to be a bad memory, a bad outcome of that. So thank you very much for what you do.
[Lindsay Hull] Yes, thank you so much and thank you for having me.
