Working With Staff

Any type of change requires extra effort within the school.

Advance planning is important to make it easier for everyone involved to feel comfortable and support the Farm-to-School program. It does not seem possible to over-communicate!

Link to Teacher Resources

Your Task	How Willmar Does It
Begin planning far in advance.	In early spring, Annette the food service director consults with Lynn the "forager" about seasonal availability of local food items. They make a rough draft of the next school year's farm to school menu.
Find simple and tasty recipes that will work in your school.	Annette spent hours reading recipe books and searching the Internet for appropriate recipes that she could “scale up” for food service. You can reap the rewards of her efforts by using the recipes that are on this website! Annette’s criteria for choosing a recipe: supplemental ingredients are items the kitchen normally has on hand recipe will work with equipment available; no extra equipment needed staff can handle the time requirements cost is within acceptable range recipe is likely to be acceptable to students
Involve cooks and other food service staff in the planning process.	A late spring planning meeting is scheduled with head cooks and key staff in the Willmar school district. This is a two-hour, hands-on meeting in a school kitchen to test recipes that Annette wants to use. Preparations that Annette makes for this meeting: She works with the head cook at the host school to make sure that all necessary ingredients are stocked. Copies are made of each recipe that is being considered for the next school year; both a small-scale "home" version to be tested and a scaled-up food service version for staff to read. Stations are set up in the kitchen on the meeting day: each station includes a recipe and the ingredients and equipment needed to prepare that recipe. Staff members choose the station where they want to work. Staff members prepare the recipe at their station and set the results out for sampling. All staff members taste the results of each recipe and evaluate it for ease of preparation, tastiness, and so on.
Evaluate and troubleshoot recipes.	Plan time at a follow-up cooks' meeting to read through and troubleshoot the scaled-up versions of the recipes. Annette found that last-minute questions came up during the school year about preparing the scaled-up recipes. For instance, one cornbread recipe called for eggs. Shell eggs were used for the small test recipe. When it came time to prepare the cornbread for students, the head cook realized that she would have to crack dozens of eggs, which would take too much time. The problem was solved by quickly ordering a container of pre-cracked eggs, but it would have been good to have that issue identified ahead of time.
Finalize the menus for the upcoming school year.	Menus need to be planned to balance the workflow, because additional work is often needed to prepare vegetables or foods that come in bulk from the local farms. Annette used NUTRIKIDS software to create menus that would include local food items and meet federal school lunch guidelines. Her sample menus are available on this website.
Train cooks and cafeteria workers on how to offer new foods to students.	Staff should not communicate their own biases about new foods to students. Staff should be willing to give foods more than one chance to be accepted by students.