APA Central Kitchen

 

Since APA took on the responsibility of preparing our own meals in the summer of 2021, significant changes have been implemented to improve food quality and production. Previously, our school contracted with a food service company, which provided all the meals served at APA. While this transition hasn't been easy, it became clear last year that it would be beneficial to take this step for our students with the resources available. These efforts were spearheaded by Emily Peery, the director over Food Services, Stephanie Egli, the school nutrition manager, and Kristin Osmond, one of our food service workers. 

Finding a suitable location that was kitchen-ready and didn't require construction this year was simply a miracle. The facility was previously a restaurant and had many resources our Food Service program needed. APA staff spent the summer working long hours cleaning, installing equipment, and ensuring the facility met regulations. 

While the project to prepare lunches began many months ago, it's only recently that significant challenges started to decrease. Over the last five months, our staff has replaced and upgraded appliances, purchased and installed new prep equipment, worked tirelessly to procure food for our lunches while developing healthy menu items that can be prepped and packaged efficiently for distribution. 

Emily shared that they have recently installed larger sinks and in the next few weeks the kitchen will get a new walk-in fridge that is almost double the size of the existing one. She is currently working with Operations to improve the old lobby of the restaurant to create more available prep space to accommodate growth. 

In addition to the facility improvements, our staff has grown as the demand for school lunches increased. In previous years we provided 1500 school lunches per day on average. With the transition to free lunch in 2021, the number of meals served has increased to 2200 per day. To accommodate this impressive growth, we needed to hire. While many schools are struggling to find enough employees, our Food Service program is now well staffed for our current production. We have 14 employees at the Central Kitchen and 14 employees delivering lunches at the schools.  

Understanding that demand for our lunch program will increase in 2022, we are continually looking for great team members. To help make working in our Food Service program convenient, we try to keep our kitchen work within school hours so parents with students can drop off and pick up their kids. If you know someone interested in working in Food Service, please refer them to our Careers page. 

We can't share the success of the Central Kitchen without expressing overwhelming gratitude for its Director, Emily Peery. Emily has managed our school lunch vendors and employees for several years; however, she found an opportunity to improve the quality of our program, at times, working 12 hour days and 7-day workweeks to bring it to fruition. At the beginning of the year it was not uncommon to see Emily and her team members working from 7 am to midnight to prepare and deliver lunch to our campuses.

In October 2021, the USBE Child Nutrition Program representative from the State office visited our Central Kitchen and our campuses to audit our system. The representative was impressed. They shared that APA has one of the most technologically advanced Food Service programs of any schools they had visited. They were surprised that all of our record-keeping is electronic,

including tracking lunches served or unused. When we have to use paper tracking sheets, they are scanned and entered into our system quickly. These are just some of the ways our processes have become more efficient and helped improve distribution. 

There are many regulations to adhere to when providing lunch to students. These regulations make deliveries complex and can increase costs and cause waste. For example, the state requires schools to offer five items to our students: milk, fruit, a vegetable, a grain, and protein. At other schools, students only have to take 3 items for the meal to be reimbursable. Because we serve meals in the classrooms, every item must be wrapped individually and delivered in each lunch even if our students won't eat them. These regulations maximize our costs and cause waste, which can impact our program's efficiency and quality. This is why the changes Emily and her team have made are so important. These improved processes reduce costs and allow APA to direct all available resources to enhance the quality of our lunch program. 

Emily has worn many hats at American Prep, from District Project Manager to Draper 2 Campus Director, and now Director over Food Services. She stated that "Developing the Food Service program has been one of the hardest things I have ever done. It's a combination of physical and mental work that has been challenging for everyone. I could not have done it alone - I relied heavily on Stephanie and all the school lunch employees." Emily and her team's hard work have paid off. They have stabilized a very challenging system and helped increase production while improving quality and reducing cost. 

Our Food Service team would like to express their gratitude again for our many parent volunteers in addition to our Finance, IT, Procurement, Operations, and Executive teams. They would also like to express huge thanks to Swen Nielsen at Century 21 and Erik Butters at Speedmaster Pro Cleaning for going the extra mile to find the perfect facility and helping to make sure it was ready. 

We are excited for the future of the APA Central Kitchen and thank our entire APA community for supporting this program.