What would it take to serve fresh, healthy, plant-rich school meals to every kid in the U.S.? Schools often rely on processed, unhealthy foods because they’re easier to supply and serve. Buying and serving sustainably farmed local produce requires special partnerships with nearby farms, and trained, knowledgeable cafeteria staff with the right equipment to cook fresh ingredients from scratch. It’s a complex challenge—one that the Chef Ann Foundation has set out to solve.
Founded by Chef Ann Cooper, a pioneer in school food reform, the nonprofit’s mission is to ensure that every child has access to healthy, nutritious meals in school. Since 2009, CAF has brought scratch cooking to over 14,000 U.S. schools across all 50 states by empowering districts with the tools, training, resources, and funding to improve meal programs and to advocate for systemic changes in their districts.
In addition to supporting better health outcomes for millions of kids, CAF’s initiatives encourage schools to adopt more climate-friendly practices. CAF’s Healthy School Food Pathway program equips school staff to source and prepare fresh food from local farms, reducing food waste and supporting small and medium-sized sustainable farms. Buying locally also helps reduce the carbon footprint of transporting food over long distances and keeps dollars in local economies.
With a grant from Waverley Street, CAF is launching a new Values Aligned Purchasing Co-op program to help school districts form buying groups to combine their resources to get better deals from high-quality food suppliers. This in turn supports networks of smaller-scale farms that might otherwise not be able to access institutional partners. After launching in California, the program will expand to Arizona and New Mexico.
Waverley Street’s Priya Clemens recently moderated a panel discussion at Front Porch Farms in Healdsburg, California, about CAF’s work.
Panelists:
Nick Anicich: Farm to School Program Manager at California Department of Food & Agriculture
Mara Fleishman: CEO, Chef Ann Foundation
Anna Nakamura Knight: Farmer, Old Grove Orange
Christina Lawson: Food Service Director, Western Placer Unified School District
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Priya Clemens: Mara, I'd love to hear a little bit more about your role as CEO of Chef Ann Foundation.
Mara Fleishman: So first, I am a mom of three, and I live in Boulder, Colorado, and they have grown up getting school food at Boulder Valley School District. Before [Chef Ann Foundation], I was with Whole Foods Market for 13 years. I met Ann [Cooper] and basically, she told me I needed to stop providing better and better food to middle- and upper-income people and come work for her and help the 30 million kids that are getting served really low-quality food.
Now, the Chef Ann Foundation does work in every state in the country, and we help districts move from serving more processed food to serving freshly prepared, scratch-cooked food. What we've learned over the 15 years is that the foundation of this work starts with school food professionals—that it's how they think about their job, it's how they approach their work, it's the skill sets they have, it's how we value them. And so this program that we were able to launch in California, Healthy School Food Pathway, is the first-of-its-kind workforce development program to help build that foundation of school food professionals.
Clemens: Nick, could you tell us a little bit more about the work that you're doing, the wins and challenges of implementing the biggest farm-to-school program in the nation, here in California.
Nick Anicich: I'm the California Farm to School Program Manager at the Department of Food and Ag, and we administer the California Farm to School Incubator grant program, and we advance the California Farm to School roadmap. This year, we announced $52.8 million in funding. It's 195 projects: 108 school districts are getting funded this year to implement Farm to School plans that connect the dots between procurement and education. And then we also have 60 projects that are funded in our Farm to School Producer and Food Hub track. What's unique about our program is that we're not just funding the schools to make the changes. We're also supporting the supply chain too. So in this producer track, there are 60 awardees. Of those 60 producers and food hubs, 57 are from socially disadvantaged backgrounds and communities. There are five Native American tribes represented, and 100% of these grantees use climate-smart agricultural practices.
Clemens: Anna, as a farmer yourself with deep roots in Southern California, tell us about the importance of this connection between school meals and the farming community.
Anna Nakamura Knight: I'm a fifth-generation farmer in one of those 60 projects that Nick was just talking about. I farm in Southern California in a town called Redlands, which is about 60 miles east of Los Angeles. I grew up picking and packing oranges, selling those at farmers markets. From about the mid 2000s, a few farmers in my area formed a food hub, Old Grove Orange. We are a coalition of 25 different farming families in the Inland Empire that sell exclusively to K–12 public school districts, and we've been doing this for 19 years. When we talk about the impacts of Farm to School—Farm to School is what financially supports my family. It's what put me through college. It's what supports the families of our farm workers and gives them full-time, year-round work. And so this is really the engine that supports our farming economy.
I envision a time, soon, when being a chef working to feed children fresh, delicious, and nourishing food will no longer be considered renegade.
Chef Ann Cooper
Clemens: Christina, you are a Healthy School Food Pathway Fellow yourself, and you're also a Food Service Director. I'd love to hear about some of your experiences around building the workforce in schools as well, and what is needed in order to support better school meals.
Christina Lawson: I am the Food Service Director for Western Placer Unified School District. It's in Lincoln, California, just north of Sacramento. We are a school district of 8,000 awesome students across 13 school sites. I had the pleasure of being in the inaugural cohort of fellows for the Chef Ann Foundation. And the fellowship was really a once in a lifetime opportunity, not only from the year of growth and development and all the knowledge that they gave us, but also just the network of the fellows. There is no way that our program would be doing the work that we're doing—we're hitting over 50% scratch cook. We're hitting towards 70% at some of our programs, and I spent 50% of my over $2 million food budget last year buying local direct from producers. I would not be able to do that without what I learned from the fellowship.
Clemens: So Mara, could you help us make sense of what an integrated approach looks like, and how the apprenticeship program fits in?
Fleishman: Yes, we are working in the apprenticeship program to train folks on culinary skills, how to use equipment, meals per labor hour, fiscal modeling, procurement. But those are all the pieces: the way you think about your job and your impact on the food system, on children's health, on the environment. This is the kind of mentality shift that I think the Healthy School Food Pathway program is bringing. We're going to be in close to 70 school districts with pre-apprentices and apprentices in California. And that is no small feat. We have only been operating this program for about 18 months since it's been supported, and people are moving fast.
The most recent report we saw said that California school food programs have a 13% vacancy rate right now. If you have a 13% vacancy rate, you start to kind of roll things back. So we have to make sure that we have the robust staff that is needed. That means we have to communicate that these jobs are valuable, that they are important, that they are the center—that not just math and social studies and science in K–12 is important, but that nutrition and food is valued by all of us, by the community.
We are now starting to embark on values-aligned co-ops for small and mid-sized districts, bringing them together so that they can have more buying power to purchase more local, regenerative, and organic food. And that's the next step in this process, and California is the first to move it forward. And then after that is Arizona and New Mexico. So we're so grateful to the partnership with Waverley to move this forward.
Clemens: We’d love to hear what this values-aligned co-op will actually mean going forward.
Lawson: I think there's going to be a few things that happen if we can make procurement more streamlined and easier on districts. I think we're going to see more small to mid-sized producers and a wider variety of people going out for our bids. It's going to allow us to just do more purchasing with different vendors. I also think it's going to make the value-based items that we're looking for more readily accessible and easier to buy, which is just going to translate to better, higher quality meals for our students.
Clemens: What are some of those items?
Lawson: For instance, it took me a really long time to find a low-sugar yogurt that was locally made, that had a clean label, right? Items that are produced by local producers, but then also have the nutrition content that we're looking for.
Clemens: Mara, could you take us back to the root of all of this? Why does this matter? What does this mean for our nation to bring healthier food to our children?
Fleishman: Food is at the center of so much, right? It is connected to so much. It is connected to equity. It is connected to the workforce. It is connected to the environment. It is connected to thriving. And this is why we can focus on lunch and breakfast in schools, and we can help fix all of these other pieces.
