[Darin Detwiler] Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Spoiler Alert. I'm Dr. Darin Detweiler.
[Callin Godson-Green] I'm Callin Godson-Green.
[Darin Detwiler] And we are in.
[Callin Godson-Green] Charlotte, North Carolina.
[Darin Detwiler] Charlotte, North Carolina is the home of this year's School Nutrition Association Conference. And we're here with people from all over the country, and that includes Iowa. Willow Kriegel is here from West Des Moines Public Schools. suburb of Des Moines, Iowa.
[Willow Kriegel] Yeah.
[Darin Detwiler] And what do you do there in West Des Moines?
[Willow Kriegel] So I'm the director of nutrition services. I've been in that role for 13 years now.
[Darin Detwiler] How big of a school does school talk about?
[Willow Kriegel] We're just about 9,000 students. Just.
[Darin Detwiler] Wow. How many kitchens?
[Willow Kriegel] We have 12.
[Darin Detwiler] And is it pretty much, are they independent or are they pretty much doing the same?
[Willow Kriegel] So we have 4 secondary buildings that kind of take in the food for all of our schools and then we send it out but not prepared. So they cook and prepare their food all on site, serve all the kids on real trays with real silverware. We're really not big on packaging, having fresh fruit and vegetable bars in every location. And so that's kind of how our operation works.
[Darin Detwiler] With the fresh produce, do you have the ability to have some local sourcing?
[Willow Kriegel] Yeah, so we source our produce with Laffredo Produce, which is a local produce supplier in our area. And they try to preference local produce as much as possible.
[Darin Detwiler] Do the students have an awareness of that this is local produce.
[Willow Kriegel] We do some campaigning on that. We put out signs on the salad bars when something is local or a try it day, things like that to try to just get that awareness out that their food is coming from local vendors.
[Darin Detwiler] We're talking kids with a try a day. I imagine sometimes there's hits and there's misses.
[Willow Kriegel] Yeah, certainly. So that's one of the reasons why we have our fresh fruit and vegetable bar. We have it available for all students and we allow them to take as much as they want. We ask them to take a serving and then if they want to come back, something was really good, they can come back and get it. Or if they take something that they weren't sure of and they didn't like it, then they know to not come back and get more of that item. It gives them exposure and it gets them to try things without that pressure of I have to eat it if I took it. So we try to just let them take a small portion and don't require them to take the full like half cup or quarter cup serving. Yeah, it really helps with food waste and it helps with getting kids to get a variety on their tray.
[Darin Detwiler] Does this end up informing you, oh, we should incorporate this going forward.
[Willow Kriegel] Yeah, definitely. I mean, we know the things that they really, really like and we know the things that maybe they don't like so much.
[Darin Detwiler] We've heard from some schools that we do things every once in a while in bowls because those are popular in the restaurants. Or one school did a food truck. What are some of the kind of unique elements or even the challenges that you face in Iowa?
[Willow Kriegel] Sure. I mean, we watch local trends, obviously, just going out in the community, looking at restaurants, looking at what kids are buying out there, what are restaurants putting on their menu, what's trending, like you mentioned, bowls, rice bowls, noodle bowls, all of those things, protein bowls. pretty popular. Protein's kind of the big buzzword right now. Everybody's wanting that extra protein. So marketing our menus to let students know we have a nutritional app that they can access that tells them how many grams of protein are available in each of our food items. So they can really go through and build their custom build their menu and pick the things and see if they're going to get the grams of protein that they're expecting. Or if I choose this item, I get less protein versus this item, for example, that are on the menu. So if you're focused on a certain nutrient, you can certainly customize your build your meal to those standards. Like at our high school level, we have over 8 entrees a day available. And all of those come with different things in their nutritional profiles that kids can really target. So we do a lot of nutrition education on how to use or navigate our software, our devices that we have at their hands that they can use not only to navigate lunch, but teachers can use those in the classrooms as tools as well.
[Darin Detwiler] As you're talking about all this, I hear definitely transparency. but also ownership. I mean, the idea of data-driven decision-making in the palm of their hands, and we never had that when I was a kid, but now you're having people looking for this and really kind of saying, I want to go with that because this is fitting my needs.
[Willow Kriegel] Right. It really helps with those tough conversations when parents call and say, my child didn't get enough to eat today, or my athlete needs more protein. Well, let's look at what your athlete could choose They could choose the beans on the salad bar. That's going to give them additional protein. They could choose this chicken sandwich that has 36 grams of protein rather than choosing this corn dog, for example, that only has 20. They're going to get 16 more grams of protein from choosing the chicken sandwich or choosing the beans So you can go around the servery and you can build yourself a protein packed meal if that's your target. So it helps me with those conversations with coaches or parents or even students themselves that are saying, I'm not getting enough protein. I need more protein. You need to give us bigger portions and things like that, where I can really teach them how to build their meal to get the needs from what we're offering.
[Darin Detwiler] I would imagine too, part of that conversation is, okay, yes, there's a couple more grams of protein, but it's still a highly processed, ultra-processed snack food that they're just selling as higher protein, but it's only 2 grams of protein more. Those beans in the salad bar are much more protein, and it's It's more natural, the whole food, it's not the processed at all kind of a thing. There's information, but there's also the bigger picture kind of conversations.
[Willow Kriegel] Sure, yeah, just the food items that are just supplementing by putting some protein powder into oatmeal, for instance, or those kinds of things, or pancake mix, I see that a lot in the grocery store, versus whole real food that contains the protein and the fiber and the nutrients, other nutrients that they're going to get from that food item rather than a fortified food item.
[Darin Detwiler] We've talked about technology here in the students' hands as well, but also the workforce having technology. What kind of technology are you guys using behind the scenes, whether it's shipping and receiving and scales, but also even temperature monitoring and environmental controls. What kind of technology is your staff working with these days?
[Willow Kriegel] We've gotten pretty techy in these last few years. Probably over the last seven, eight years, we've added a lot of temperature monitoring systems. cooler freezer temperature monitoring and also our handhelds where all of our menus are integrated right into the handheld and staff can take the temperature with the food item. It helps us with the flow of food. It actually gives them their corrective action right in the handheld. So if it's too hot or too cold, it tells them that information. They can put a corrective action in there. It helps with food quality, not only safety, but from a quality standpoint of overcooking something. So we have a threshold where it tells you you've cooked it too hot or you haven't cooked it hot enough. So we have that. And the funny thing with that is we were very nervous about doing that. We had some older workforce that were very resistant to technology. It was scary. Just even checking their e-mail was scary. And so we piloted that at one school with our oldest lead cook who barely had the ability to check her e-mail and function in her electronic production records, was very resistant to technology. And we put that in her hand And she loved it. She was our biggest ambassador of that because she literally was like, I don't have to write on paper anymore. I can literally just click chicken nugget and I can take its temperature. I can, and all the way through the flow of food. And I don't have to write anything down anywhere. No, you just have to sanitize your And so, and every morning her menu was just populated in there for her and she didn't have to guess, and so she really went to the rest of the team when we had our head cooks or our lead cook meetings. And she's like, I'm loving this. And everyone else is like, well, where's ours? Because we did a whole year first of piloting with her. Because if it passed her, we knew the others could do it. So we really didn't want to commit to that until we really got through that. So that's been very helpful. On the cooler freezer side of things, before we had our temperature monitoring in place, we had a freezer go down at Valley Southwoods. It not only went down, but it actually heated itself up to 90 degrees in the box. And it was over the summer. And so it was two weeks before the custodians and the building principal called me and said, we think there's a dead mouse somewhere, but we can't find it. And we're going to have open house tomorrow and our building smells really bad. And so I went up there and the first thing I did was I went to the cooler and freezers and I saw the dial. 90 degrees. And I looked through the window and stuff was literally melting down.
[Callin Godson-Green] Cooking, starting to cook.
[Willow Kriegel] It was cooking. It had cooked. It turned proteins to sludge.
[Callin Godson-Green] Oh my gosh.
[Willow Kriegel] And we cleaned that freezer that day with the help of my staff. And it was a walk-in. I mean, it was a big one. You don't want to throw away all your pans and all your things. So we had to like really re, you know, scrub and clean and have a company come in and scrub the walls. And I mean, we had to do a lot. And so when that happened, that's how important it is to be able to have alarms going off and alerting you because especially during the summer months, you don't know that that's happening. And just not only the loss of the food insurance pays for that, but the cleanup, it was horrific. So now sometimes I get a little bothered by alarms going off on the regular. but we don't have any of those incidents happen anymore. We know that our food is stored properly, it's safe. I can see when somebody's put something too hot in a freezer and it alerts me. I can see when they didn't shut the milk cooler after lunch. I can see all of those things from my office and that's worth its weight in gold for me.
[Darin Detwiler] Yeah, so many times you hear people, oh, what's it gonna cost to do this? What's it gonna cost to do this? It's like the more important question to be asking is, what is the cost of not doing this? What's the cost of not investing into that temperature monitoring? And I think you said it was not when students were there. Imagine if it was lunchtime. That's when things usually break and you have everyone in a line waiting for you to feed them kind of a thing. You know, I was reminded of a conversation we had last year at the live event in Nashville with someone who works at an amusement park and was talking about the difference between technology in the hands of a younger employee versus an older employee. And I don't think that, I mean, it's incredible how you went about it by putting it into the hands of your oldest employee, but I don't think people necessarily think about the idea of 1 generation or one set of expectations versus another that not all employees are going to embrace technology the same way and boom, you're trying to make this transition into here's how we're going to use technology when we're trying to achieve this. So when you piloted it with the older employee, you then tried it with some of the younger employees?
[Willow Kriegel] They were begging for it. Yeah.
[Darin Detwiler] Wow.
[Willow Kriegel] And so we went live with all buildings and that was five years ago. My own six years ago.
[Darin Detwiler] And now there's people that would imagine their entire experience has been we've always had this technology.
[Willow Kriegel] Which doesn't happen super often, but we have had handhelds not work or probes get bent and they have to get by with their backup. They're begging, when is it coming? When are you getting another one? When can I expect my handheld to arrive? I keep two in my office now because they're getting older. We haven't replaced them. like I said, it's been five or six years we've been using the same ones. I've bought new probes, but that's about it. And so, but when they're down, when they don't have one, they're really, it's hard. It's kind of like our labeling system too. We have a labeling system we use. They hit the food item, it prints out a label form, it puts the discard date on there and the whole 9 yards, all they have to do is put their initials. And when that labeling machine isn't working and they have to go to masking tape again, they really feel it, and it really does save the labor. I do not think we could be as efficient as we are at my role and their role if we did not have the technology in place that we have, the labeling machine, the temperature monitoring system. Back to the coolers and freezers, another big one is You have coolers that go high at night sometimes, which I didn't know this until I was monitoring them, go high and they've ran high for hours and hours and hours and then they cool down. So the staff doesn't even know that their food was adulterated in the night, same with milk coolers we've had where milk coolers ran super high and then it freezes itself. Well, they don't know that milk sat for 8 hours above 41 degrees because the cooler corrects itself the next day. So if you're just writing a paper log, you're just getting a moment in time. You don't know what happened in the night when you weren't there. And that I have found has happened quite often.
[Darin Detwiler] Yeah. You know, I remember encountering a district that was trying to save money, what they did was they paid some outside electrical consultant to do this thing where there were so many printers and photocopy machines and all these different things, but they went into energy saver mode. not the device, like the building. And what they didn't take into consideration is you don't want your freezer or cooler unit on energy saver mode in the middle of the night. We have to keep this at this temperature or within this, you know, or outside of this range or whatever it is kind of a thing.
[Willow Kriegel] Yeah, it's just faulty thermostats. I mean, they're just not cycling like they're supposed to. fixing themselves. I don't know what they're doing in the night. The gremlins are in there doing stuff. But we didn't know the gremlins were in there until we started monitoring.
[Darin Detwiler] There you go.
[Willow Kriegel] And you can also see when a piece of equipment is. is failing or struggling, you can see it go up and down and up and down. And then that's just an indicator, a telltale sign, like something's going to go bad, and you need to get somebody out there to look at it. And oftentimes it's the coils need cleaned or something simple like that.
[Darin Detwiler] Well, but if you're paying attention, it gives you that luxury of trying to catch it before it's too late.
[Willow Kriegel] Absolutely. I can't think of how many we've caught before they've happened.
[Callin Godson-Green] And how do you feel the reception has been? So when I was in the food industry, sometimes we had a continuous monitoring system like that. And sometimes I could tell, I was like, this is going to break because that's what it always looks like before it breaks. And then I'd be kind of getting facilities involved. And then sometimes facilities, their mindset was more like, they're like, we came out, we tempted it, was fine when we were there, you know, did you find that it was a hard balance of being like, There is something going wrong here. Like we need to take a deeper look. Something can be fixed. Like you can tell, it mightn't have alarmed, but the whole point now might be 39 and last week it was 36 so something's going on. Have you struggled with that?
[Willow Kriegel] Well, we have a preferred vendor that we use for maintenance and equipment repairs. And one thing that I, and we have a work order system that we go in and create a work order and I assign it to them. It's another system. It's our operations department system that they use. But I go in as a user and I access it and it goes straight to this third party maintenance equipment repair company. And I can attach pictures and I can attach records. And oftentimes I will do a 24 hour print out on a PDF of the temperature fluctuation and what it's doing. And I'll give that to them to help with the diagnosis of the issue with the piece of equipment. So you can actually give your text what you're seeing, and you can go back and look at history, and you could even say, when this happened before, this is what it looked like, and then here it's happening again, and then this is what it looks like, and you can actually attach those right into the work order. That is how I handle that situation.
[Callin Godson-Green] And then even that direction of like, this is what it looked like when the coil needed cleaning. So maybe you could start there, guys. Right. Yeah.
[Willow Kriegel] And that also is a money saver too, because we have an in-house just guy that delivers our groceries and he's, you know, has extra time here and there and he's able to do little bits of things. He can clean the coils. He can go change filters and things like that. So we'll be like, hey, Scott, you know, you might want to go over and check that. And oftentimes he'll go over and go, yep, it was dirty and I cleaned and it's running fine. So that even saves us that third-party call as well.
[Darin Detwiler] Before we close out our episode here, the elephant in the room is that you've invested in technology and training of your work staff. And if all goes well, all this work going on behind the scenes, the students, your customers, they'll never know. That's kind of what, we want them to focus on their school. We want them to focus on their culture and their growing and, being a kid, not have to worry about, oh, but I'm trying to eat or I don't have a food for this. It also sounds like you've gone the extra step of giving that empowerment to the older students to be able to have some of this information on an app and be able to build whatever meal they're trying to do to achieve their goals. This is not what we hear from every school district. we hear school districts that we wish we had local produce. We wish we had something other than chalkboards. We wish we had digital things. And I don't think that most people, even most state legislators know this. I went to a state legislator event and I was just showing them the differences from this state to this state to this state. They had no idea. And you go thinking, my state has this, my school has this, my technology is this, and you have no idea what other schools. So I hope that you're able to share that with other school nutrition folks that are here, but also that you're able to gain from them some insights in terms of, oh, there is a way to solve this issue. I love that you ended up getting yourself certified as a proctor. for ServSafe. And now you're not only doing it in-house, but even doing it outside of the school district. Because one of the questions I just got in a session I was in was, how do we do this? Is this even a possibility? Yes, it is. Here's an example of someone who's doing it.
[Willow Kriegel] Yeah. It's been really rewarding teaching food safety to, you know, it makes me feel like I'm able to help the community even because I'm making sure that the food that they're eating out in restaurants and in our schools is safe. And that's, I don't know how many people I've certified in food safety over my 16 years that I've been doing that. It's been, it's probably 1000 or more people. But that's really rewarding knowing that I have that out there. And our staff, even our general workers, which is our part-time folks that come in and help, they can become ServSafe certified and get a little extra money on their paychecks that way. So that's an incentive for them. But it just makes sure that all of our food We have over three or four in every building that are ServSafe certified at all times. And that's really comforting to me. And it's rewarding for me to teach them.
[Darin Detwiler] Well, Willow, thanks for spending some time with us. And I just so many incredible and inspirational insights you share with us today. And I hope that our viewers are able to find that inspiration and realize that, you know what, if you're out there thinking that this can't be done, There are a lot of things that can be done if you have the willow to do it.
[Callin Godson-Green] Oh my god.
