Good-tasting, Fresh and Local School Meals
How we approach school meals
1. We are known for producing fresh, local, and culturally appropriate meals for kids
We provide school kids and innovative school managers …
- … with good-tasting, …
- … culturally and culinarily appropriate, …
- … nutritious, …
- … and affordable meals…
- … that the kids like to eat …
- … by partnering with local ethnic and minority restaurant and catering entrepreneurs …
- … with backgrounds identical to the school population they serve, …
- … by providing them with kitchen infrastructure, sales, financial, and legal services …
- … such that they can use the school business as launch platform for their own private catering business, …
- thereby creating a win/win/win model.
2. The schools we serve
Because our emphasis is on quality of the food served and on maximizing the uptake of our food by kids, we seek school and nutrition managers who care about the following:
- They view food as an integral part of the kids’ well-being and education.
- They encourage kids to take advantage of the meals being offered and want them to eat the food being served, not dump it into trash.
- They view the price of the meal as a financial constraint to be met as part of their budget, not as an objective in itself or an oblique source of funding for the school.
- They are willing to partner with their foodservice vendor to innovate and transform the school’s food as we know it.
As a result of our focus, we are particularly successful with chartered schools in gateway cities of Massachusetts where school administrators value the quality of food we provide and the partnership we establish with them to encourage participation of their kids in our meals program.
3. Good-tasting meals
Sadly, serving good-tasting food is rarely part of discussions between school administrators, vendors and regulators. The taste of food is a distant consideration, far below price, reimbursement amount, meeting nutrition requirements, and convenience of the school staff. Kids and parents of course care about the quality of the food, but decision-makers generally ignore their input and assume that school food is by definition bad and cheap, all vendors are equally mediocre, and one might as well pick the cheapest one. Many schools no longer bother to have tastings during the RFP process, a sad representation of the state of affairs in school food.
At the risk of appearing self-serving, Stock Pot Malden believes that providing tasty meals should be an integral part of the decision process of schools. We are generally considered to provide the highest available quality for school meals in the greater Boston area and take great pride in that.
We invest significantly more than our competitors in the quality (and cost!) of the ingredients we use, rely on the fact that our kitchens are located close to the schools they serve to maintain freshness and provide immediate customer service, and rotate our recipes frequently to incorporate the schools’ feedback and accommodate seasonal ingredients.
4. Culturally and culinarily appropriate
The majority of school-age kids live in inner cities and are black and brown. Their cultural and culinary heritage is quite different from the mostly white-American food provided by large-scale foodservice vendors. They crave food similar to what their mother cooks for them at home, yet seldom receive it, at least in authentic form (American chop suey, anyone?).
Stock Pot Malden works with chefs that share the cultural background of the students they cook for. We believe that matching the ethnic population of a school with a local chef and team of similar background is the best way to provide culinarily appropriate meals to kids. This is why we develop partnerships with local chefs and help them learn how to serve schools.
Doing one-on-one matches is possible in some cities and neighborhoods, but not always possible given the melting pot nature of Massachusetts (and America). In situations where multiple heritages are represented, we organize a rotation of cuisines within the menu we serve (e.g., Dominican food and Cambodian food in Lowell) and strive to expand the palate of each kid to the cuisine of the other group.
5. Nutritious
Federal regulation mandates nutrition standards that every vendor must meet in order to allow their client school to be reimbursed for the meals they serve. This is the minimum requirement (“table stake”).
We think nutrition is a lot more than measuring the minimum number of protein, grain, vegetables or fruit ounces being served, or limiting the amount of fat, salt or sugar in a meal. Fresh vegetables are more nutritious than canned or frozen ones. Locally grown tomatoes are healthier than Florida tomatoes ripened from green tennis balls to red, tasteless tomatoes ripened through ethylene on their way to the school. Turmeric and multiple other spices have multiple health properties. While this nutritional value may not be transparent to school administrators or even school kids, we believe they matter and incorporate this “extra nutrition” in our menus.
6. Affordable
The price of a school meal is largely set by the reimbursement price granted annually by the US Department of Agriculture and managed in Massachusetts by the Deparment of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). We believe schools should pay that amount to foodservice vendors, not try to earn a margin on that reimbursement price by asking the vendor to bid below that price and generate a profit for themselves. When they do so, they effectively steal for other internal funding purposes what was meant to go into the quality of the food that kids receive. This sad reality is arguably the main driver of the race to mediocrity in school food.
For that reason, we are rarely the cheapest vendor for school meals on competitive bids. We typically bid at the reimbursement price allowed by the USDA, although the announcement of that price often requires us to guess what that price will be since the government often finalizes its price several months past the RFP process. The price premium we charge vs. low-end competitors is generally minimal (a few cents). Industrial meals produced in large, out-of-town food factories and often delivered frozen (or partially frozen), usually offer the lowest bid on Request for Proposals for schools. If price is your primary decision criteria, we are probably not the right choice for you. If your decision criteria involve supplementing the price dimension with other considerations, we are likely to come out on top.
What allows us to remain comparatively cheap in spite of our higher quality is the partnership we create with our own suppliers. Just like we believe that a school foodservice vendor should involve more than creating a commodity game where price solely drives the relationship, we develop partnerships with our vendors (e.g., by setting up local supply chains) that allow us to reduce cost significantly, while producing a higher quality of food.
7. Kids eat the food
A lot of school food gets wasted because kids do not like it and throw it away. We always marvel at the exquisite precision with which regulators define their nutritional requirements (e.g., rotation of vegetables in any given week across six different colors!), yet there is no measure of whether the food ends up in the stomach of the kid or in the waste bin. Most schools do not even have a survey-based measure of the perception of quality by kids or parents for the food they serve.
We may one day have sensors or cameras measuring the actual eating of the food by kids vs. what is being served (and paid for by the government) but for now, we are happy to settle on our own observation of kids eating and the feedback of school service attendants
8. Partnering with local chefs of comparable backgrounds to the kids
We believe school food, in order to be fresh, nutritious and attractive, needs to be made locally by chefs who embody the culinary heritage of the school kids they serve, something that cannot be accomplished by building large industrial food factories with national rigid menus. These chefs exist in most towns and cities, and the role of Stock Pot Malden is to help them get access to their local schools by giving them the infrastructure and support they need to reach the level of professionalism required.
Working with local chefs and their team also solves the manpower problem faced by the foodservice industry. Large food vendors have a tough time attracting and retaining qualified personnel because working for a large impersonal company is not particularly enjoyable. In this situation, food workers tend to adopt a mercenary mentality that has them hopping from company to company in search of the maximum compensation at any given time. Being part of a small entreprenurial team anchored in the local fabric of a city or town is inherently more attractive and generates for the local enterprise a higher quality of employees and a deeper commitment to their values.
Visit our capabilities and experience page for more details