A Visit to Boulder
(L-R) Elizabeth Corley; Amelia Stathatos; Matthew Koger; John Koger; Susan Chernesky Koger; Mara Fleishman; Alison Friduss; John Akscin; and Mary Rochelle, on August 25, 2022, at the Boulder Valley School District Culinary Center, Boulder, CO.
Recently, we had the great pleasure of visiting Boulder, Colorado, to join Mara Fleishman and Alison Friduss of the Chef Ann Foundation, an ABZFF grantee, on a tour of the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) Culinary Center to learn more about the BVSD School Food Project.
For many years, Chef Ann Cooper, who founded the Chef Ann Foundation in 2009 to promote whole-ingredient, scratch cooking in schools, was the Director of Food Services at BVSD. Over the years, the Chef Ann Foundation has supported more than 13,000 schools in providing more than 3.3 million students with healthy school food, including those within the BVSD, and Chef Ann has become a national advocate for scratch-cooked school meals and healthy school food for all. (Just this week, she was invited to be a part of the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health in Washington, DC. )
Because of the work and advocacy of Chef Ann, the BVSD Culinary Center is a nationally-recognized, leading example of a school district central kitchen – one that has the tools, resources, and staff needed to scratch-cook and serve healthy school lunches on a large scale – and it’s used as a model by the Chef Ann Foundation for other school lunch programs and professionals.
Opened in 2020, the BVSD Culinary Center is the central production kitchen for BVSD. It replaced four district regional kitchens and centralized the food production for the 29,000 students in BVSD. The space itself is impressive at 33,000 square feet and with 180 employees. What’s more impressive is the volume the team produces – more than 15,000 meals per day, including breakfast and lunch options.
Led by Mary Rochelle of the BVSD School Food Project, our tour of the facility included visits to their cold and dry storage areas; the produce wash room; the menu planning area; and the kitchens themselves where chefs were hard at work preparing upcoming school lunches. We were so impressed with the scale of their work – and with their commitment to using local produce and ingredients. During our visit, Colorado peppers, tomatoes, and peaches were in season and in stock – and being added to the menu.
Following the tour, we had a great discussion with Mara, Ali, and Mary about the importance of healthy, nutritious, scratch-cooked school food and how it affects the physical and mental well-being of students. Joining us were Suzy’s husband, Matt, a high school teacher; her son, John, a middle school student; and Liz’s daughter, Amelia, a junior in high school. We were so happy to have them lend their important perspectives to the conversation, and to have young John and Amelia begin their work with ABZFF as the next generation of the Zekauskas family.
– Liz, John, & Suzy
