First Hand Look, and Taste, of How 20,000 Meals a Day are Prepared
Nearly 400 parents, students and community members stopped by the Central Nutrition Center open house to see where and how more than 20,000 meals a day are prepared.
Napoleon asserted that armies march on their stomachs. If he’d been an educator instead of a soldier he would have known the same can be said of big, diverse, urban school districts.
Hup, two, three, four…stop when you get to 20,000. That’s how many students Des Moines Public Schools serves breakfast and lunch to every day.
The graduation rate is rising, the dropout rate is dropping, they’re remodeling the schools, never had so many AP Scholars…and the food – you won’t believe the food!
Headquarters is the Central Nutrition Center at 2nd Avenue & University Ave. If you didn’t know that address as the former longtime home of Colonial Bread the big sign on the roof still stands as a reminder of the building’s past.
Yesterday DMPS Director of Food & Nutrition Sandy Huisman, Executive Chef Chad Taylor and the central culinary corps threw open the doors and invited the community inside behind the scenes for an Open House to set the stage for National School Lunch Week next week.
Some 400 folks curious for a peek behind the curtain at campus cuisine toured the spotless, efficient facilities escorted by proud, informative tour guides like Lisa Foubert, Foodservice Manager at Lincoln High School and Andrea Moore, Taylor’s right-hand at CNC.
It’s staggering to think that a core staff of 30+ Nutrition Assistants working basic shifts of 6:30 AM to 2:30 PM produces what this one does on a daily basis. CNC is a factory, warehouse, restaurant, and commercial caterer/bakery rolled into one, a veritable smorgasbord of gastro operations.
What’s the work environment? The baking room smells of cinnamon. Step into the next room and a 200-gallon vat of simmering marinara grabs you by the nostrils. No wonder everybody’s smiling.
Taylor has been a DMPS employee for 18 years and has been the Executive Chef ever since the district acquired the CNC premises in 2004 and revamped its whole way of doing foodservice.
“Thank-you all for coming today,” he told the first group through on Thursday. “We’re so glad to show you around.” The pride he takes in his great big kitchen and the vital work it performs is almost as aromatic as the fresh cookies and breadsticks being wrapped and packaged for delivery behind him. It infuses everyone around him.
Foubert peppers her group of tourists with statistics about the 40 tons of cherry tomatoes that come through the place every year and the 4,400 acres worth of grain that go into the baked goods. And all the while she’s beaming for having had a part in it.
Refrigerated items aren’t stored in walk-in coolers. Here they’re drive-ins with doors more than wide enough for forklifts to maneuver freely. Canned goods are drum-sized. Think of CNC as the kitchen in a restaurant with 70 tables, each one with seating for anywhere from several hundred up to more than 2,000. Open for breakfast and lunch M-F, nine months a year; catering available for special events by arrangement.
At tour’s end the guests were shown to a reception area rigged like the tasting room at a distillery or brewery. Scaling down from the huge vats and assembly lines they’d just seen to single-serving samples of breadsticks dipped in marinara was like a dizzying descent from great heights. But it was tasty, too.
Huisman was asked if there is a DMPS specialty of the house.
“Well, our chili is very popular,” she answered right away. “We’ve got a good recipe.”
Would she care to share it?
“Are you cooking for a thousand?” she quipped with the broad smile that everybody wears there along with their hairnets and gloves.
