Edible San Francisco

Several companies have sprung up to offer healthy, fresh lunches to Bay Area schoolchildren.

San Francisco is a foodie paradise—a place where the values “sustainable, organic, local” are ubiquitously cited on restaurant menus, a city within a few hours’ drive of the farms and ranches that feed the nation. We’re the region that gave rise to the word “locavore.” Our school lunches should be the envy of every city from coast to coast. They should be wholesome, fresh, delicious, with plenty of organic fruits and vegetables, sustainably raised lean meat, clean dairy, and whole grains.

Yet plenty of them are still mass-produced, gloppy, bland affairs. For some entrepreneurial parents and chefs, this represents an appetizing business opportunity, and they’ve founded companies that provide freshly made local, organic lunches to Bay Area schools. However, improving the quality of the average school lunch isn’t as simple as stopping at the farmers’ market, thanks to labyrinthine federal regulations, a challenging food supply chain, and the economic realities of an expensive city.

Making the grade

Several of the companies re-inventing school meals were started by chefs-turned-parents (and parents-turned-chefs). Ken Harris founded Chefables, which specializes in preschools and day-care centers, shortly after his daughter, Emily, was born. “I’m a chef, so I love food and I love cooking. All of a sudden when I had a kid I saw I had to add nutrition to the mix,” says Harris, echoing the sentiments of so many foodcentric parents. “I noticed what other parents had time to prepare. It was frightening. I wanted to offer something better.”

Chefables uses locally grown vegetables exclusively. “I’m not using asparagus in the middle of the winter or flown in from somewhere else,” says Harris. “It just doesn’t make sense.” Most of their produce is organic, too, although Harris does buy from some small farms that haven’t gone through the certification process (and fees), and he will use some non-local fruit in order to introduce kids to those flavors and textures. “When a child eats a perfectly ripened mango or papaya, they fall in love with fresh flavors,” believes Harris. “That stays with them for life.”

Jamie and Rob Feuerman founded Kid Chow in 2003, at San Francisco Friends School, when their son was in kindergarten there, from similar motives. By this past school year they were serving lunch at more than 30 Bay Area schools—a combination of private schools, parochial schools, and public schools in suburbs that have opted out of the federal school lunch program.

Like Chefables, Kid Chow sources locally as much as it can. Sometimes, Feuerman admits, she’ll buy peaches from Mexico before the season gets going in California “because if I give the kids pears for seven months straight, they stop ordering them. If I can, I get it here, but I need to offer choice. My end-game is I want kids to identify as healthy eaters.”

While both Chefables and Kid Chow seek to create healthy, produce-loving eaters, they also acknowledge that kids will be kids. “I will admit that pasta is our most popular item,” says Feuerman, “but we serve it lots of different ways. I offer a lot of variety.”

At Chefables, Harris takes a slightly different tack, partly because the kids he feeds are younger. “Our pizzas are really popular, so I came up with a quinoa crust. Say the kid only eats the crust—I still got some nutrition in them.”

These two relatively small, local companies are joined on the healthful, natural school-meal front by the much larger Revolution Foods. Launched in 2005 by Kristin Groos Richmond and Kirsten Tobey, who met at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, the women’s initial goal was to serve healthful, affordable food to a handful of Oakland charter schools. During the 2008-2009 school year, Revolution Foods served 20,000-plus meals a day in more than 100 schools in the Bay Area and Southern California. This fall, it will begin working with charter schools in Denver and Washington, D.C.

Such swift growth has been made possible with venture capital investment and an advisory board full of corporate experience. Revolution Foods also has a retail branch, run by The Nest Collective, that sells a product line of all-natural kid-targeted food such as peanut butter, cereal bars, and fruit “mashups” (mashed fruit in a box for slurping) at Whole Foods.

“We’re trying to put real food back in schools,” says Richmond. “We are also an education partner with the school— teaching about nutrition and getting the kids engaged. That includes getting their feedback and creating food they like.”

 

 

Above: In addition to serving fresh lunches, Revolution Foods has a thriving line of packaged organic snacks.

That’s key, says Amy Klein, executive chef at Revolution Foods: “If it’s going in the trash can, I’m not doing my job.” Developing meals that students like, while following federal nutrition standards and strict cost guidelines, has resulted in some surprising findings. “The students asked for fried chicken,” explains Klein, “but we don’t fry anything. So I asked, What were they looking for beside the golden, crispy skin? They liked chicken on the bone. So I came up with a honeyglazed chicken on the bone that’s become very popular.”

She’s also learned, like Feuerman, not to underestimate kids’ palates. “When you’re serving over 20,000 meals a day you realize that those kids who just eat plain noodles are unusual. Students want flavor—they want garlic and acid and salt and chile. They demand complex, robust flavors, just like adults.”

While Revolution Foods used to claim to use local and organic foods “whenever possible,” the company has shifted its language to focus on “fresh” and “healthy.” As Klein explains, it was much more manageable to source locally when the company was smaller. The company must buy a lot of its vegetables partially processed— potatoes washed and cut, lettuce washed and shredded for salads, carrots cut on the bias and ready to cook—and most local growers don’t offer processing. Klein is working with different groups and growers to increase the amount of local produce Revolution Foods can use in its different markets. But as the company has grown it has seen that while economies of scale can help bring prices down, finding large enough appropriate supply chains isn’t always easy.

Budgetary blues

Local produce, organic foods, humanely raised meats—they all cost more than their conventional counterparts, even when economies of scale are factored in. Kid Chow and Chefables mainly serve private and parochial schools, where they can bill parents directly for the cost of their meals—which run $5 to $6—and avoid a host of federal regulations. Revolution Foods, by contrast, provides meals that qualify for federal reimbursement to its schools, which are 90 percent public. Of these, about 75 percent are charter schools and 25 percent are in small districts, such as Mill Valley and Rosemond. The $3 that Revolution Foods charges per meal may sound low, but it is still proportionally far above the $2.59 the federal government reimburses schools for the free lunch program.

In San Francisco, only about $0.90 of that $2.59 is spent on the actual food in each lunch. Those two bucks and change must pay for everything involved with getting that meal to a child: the food, the cooking, the lunchroom, the cafeteria worker(s), the disposal service.

Revolution Foods’ schools make up the difference in a variety of ways. Charter schools are not subject to the same teacher union rules as other public schools, and so can ask teachers to oversee lunch distribution and clean-up, thus saving an entire salaried position other public schools must fund. Wealthier suburban districts are often willing to cover the difference for the proportionally few free or reduced meals they serve. Private schools can simply charge all students for the lunch.

“Some schools access grants,” says Richmond, “some schools balance the cost between full-pay students and free and reduced students. But at some level it’s an investment from the school.” In other words, someone, somehow pays that extra $0.41 per meal.

So while many San Francisco parents would like to see organic, locally sourced, healthful meals served in the city’s public schools, federal policy and state budget troubles make that difficult. “We waste energy not knowing how complex the system is and what it will take to make real changes,” explains Paula Jones, director of Food Systems for San Francisco Department of Public Health, “There are three things to know about improving school lunches: school meals are highly regulated, they are under-funded—especially in expensive cities like San Francisco— and they need community-wide support to have systemic change.”

School lunch regulation is extensive. Comparisons between USDA National School Lunch Program regulations and the tax code are not uncommon. The section specifically addressing the lunch program alone is 65 pages long. This reporter’s favorite example—besides an extremely densely printed six-page document titled “Final Rule: Fluid Milk Substitution in School Nutrition Programs”—is the simple fact that if a school happened to have apple trees on its grounds, the school would not be allowed to use them in a school meal. As part of nutrition education or a school garden program, yes, but not in a school meal, due to Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point Principles, a food safety system familiar to anyone in the food preparation business.

And then there’s the cost. The district receives just $2.59 from the federal government for each student who eats a free lunch, $2.19 for each student who qualifies for a reduced lunch, and $0.26 for students who pay “full price” ($2 in elementary schools, $2.50 in junior high, $3 in high schools). In theory, the state government pays an additional amount—$0.22 the last three years—but that money hasn’t always shown up. Last year the district lost $46,000 due to state reimbursements that never arrived. This year the state announced in January that by April there wouldn’t be any more money for the program.

“Renegade Lunch Lady” Ann Cooper’s impressive work of bringing fresh, healthful food to that Berkeley’s public schools is often held up as a shining example for other urban districts. But San Francisco isn’t Berkeley. An important, usually unmentioned difference between Berkeley and San Francisco is that the Berkeley district receives an additional $1.25 for each meal from the state. That extra money was first funded in the 1970s, through a Proposition 13 property-tax override that San Francisco voters did not approve. In any case, the Berkeley system is coming up against some trouble in the current economy, since it also depends on grants and other donations to make up the difference in cost between what the district can charge, what it can get reimbursed through the federal free and reduced lunch program, what the state pays, and what it costs to provide highquality meals.

Grading on a curve

Even with these restraints, meals in SFUSD have improved. High schools and junior highs have salad bars—with local and organic produce when the district can afford them. The chicken is real meat rather than reconstituted nuggets, fresh fruits are part of every meal, and no more than 30 percent of calories can come from fat. Sodas and junk food are banned. However, the meals are mass-produced—frozen and reheated.

Feuerman of Kid Chow optimistically claims “we would love to be part of the solution. If I had more lunches, I could make deals with farmers and buy produce here.” Sadly, it’s difficult to see how that would work with current regulations and, as Revolution Foods has found, limits of the supply chain and food preparation within the context of strict budget constraints.

“The real battle is on the national level,” explains Dana Woldow, a parent advocate and co-chair of the Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee for SFUSD. “We need to lobby Congress over this and get twice as much money for school lunches. Give us $5 for each meal and we can get organic, local, cooked-from-scratch meals in every school.”

Those who really want to improve school food for all the nation’s kids should focus their energies on the Child Nutrition Act, up for renewal this year. Hawaii and Alaska receive $3.04 and $4.20, respectively, for lunch reimbursement to help cover the higher cost of food and supplies there, so precedent exists for creating a more cost-responsive reimbursement rate. Beyond sheer funding, however, businesses like Kid Chow and Revolution Foods point to the potential of school meals as teaching moments. Revolution Foods brings in chefs for demonstrations and does nutritional awareness with students. Kid Chow is popular in international schools in the Bay Area because they deliver meals that aren’t “kid food.”

“We appeal to places where the lunch is more than just a meal,” explains Feuerman. “It’s part of the school day.”

Jones, of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, shares that view. “School meals need to be seen as part of the educational day. Now they are part of operations. It’s viewed as a business function that has to pay for itself. If you want to change the quality of the food, meals need to be part of the educational experience. They need to be the basis for the curriculum. We don’t expect math class to pay for itself; we don’t expect art class to generate income.”

Related: Fighting for better school lunch in San Francisco by Jen Dalton

 

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