Nine years ago, the Food & Nutrition Services (FNS) department for the Orange County (FL) Public Schools (OCPS) wasn't so much orange as red from all the ink spilling from a cumulative program deficit of $7 million. The district's former, longtime foodservice director was long gone at that point, replaced by an interim committee of three veteran supervisors charged with holding down the fort while the search for a new director went on.

It was not an easy search because OCPS was a decentralized tangle where individual schools managed their own foodservices, all the way down to menus and procurement, and principals hired their own foodservice staff. With that centrifugal dynamic in place, any new director looking to impose fiscal discipline would face an uphill climb.

Yet today, not quite a decade later, OCPS is a model of how a large urban school system's dining services can be efficient while being responsive to its young customers and to public demands for more nutritious choices.

Furthermore, the FNS program deficit is not just long gone, but replaced by a tidy surplus of nearly $12 million in its fund balance (a two-month operating cost “cushion”) as participation escalates and cost efficiencies are implemented even as the program continues to innovate in menus, operations and nutritional integrity.

Sales of reimbursable meals have grown by 51 percent (or almost 12 million meals) since 2003 (including an increase of 19 percent — or three million meals — to students who qualify for free or reduced meals). Meanwhile, breakfast sales have shot up 78 percent.

It's not just the little kids, either. Sales to secondary school students are up 42 percent in the past four years, indicating real success in finding meal choices that legendarily finicky teenagers will voluntarily choose.

In recognition of all this, OCPS's director of food & nutrition services, Lora Gilbert, MS, RD, FADA, SNS, landed a rare double honor earlier this year when she was named winner of the School Nutrition Association's top honor, the Golden School Foodservice Director of the Year in the School Nutrition Association's FAME (Foodservice Achievement & Management Excellence) competition in January, followed in May by the IFMA Silver Plate award in the School Foodservice category.

Quite a turnaround! How on earth did it happen?

Well, here's the story…

A Totally Different Approach

One commonplace “solution” to OCPS's foodservice problem in 2002 would have been to turn the program over to an outside contractor, but the district didn't want to take that option. Instead, it decided on an outside consultant to help OCPS overhaul the foodservice operation without taking actual management control of it.

The firm hired in 2002 for this task was inTeam Associates, a consultancy headed by IFMA Silver Plate Award winners Dorothy Martin and Gertrude Applebaum. In its first year, inTeam initiated centralized purchasing and menu development and established the job description for a new, robust director position.

To fill that role, inTeam and the OCPS District Chief of Operations chose Gilbert, a former nutrition specialist for Schwan's Food Service who also had some management experience running a senior dining program a decade earlier. To ease the transition, inTeam continued its involvement with OCPS until 2007.

The major challenges awaiting Gilbert included…

• • put together a strong management team
• • continue to centralize menu planning and procurement
• • centralize control over foodservice staff and implement effective performance standards and measurement protocols for them
• • develop menus that would entice more participation, especially at the middle and high school levels, while increasing the menu's overall nutritional profile
• • find new revenue streams for the FNS Department
• • reduce food and labor costs to 40% of revenues for each

One major challenge Gilbert had to tackle was gaining control of staff at the field level. “We didn't centralize right away,” she recalls. “When you have a decentralized system with lots of processes, you can't just get rid of everything overnight. We worked hard to earn the schools' trust that we could manage effectively. For example, we brought in principals and managers at every point to help process and develop the decisions we were making would affect them.”

There was also the tricky process of negotiating the transition of authority. “Those staff evaluations in the first year were probably our hardest step,” Gilbert admits. “You really have to tread lightly, but at the same time make sure that your expectations are communicated.”

It was a slow and careful process that took five years of careful steps. Even now, FNS maintains a liaison to building managers at the school sites and only in the past year stopped having one for principals as well.

Putting a Team in Place

One major contributing factor to a successful transition was the management team Gilbert assembled. Some were internal promotions, but a surprising number came from outside the school foodservice world.

“I really wanted to compete with outside foodservice,” Gilbert explains. “The outside industry does such a great job of teaching customer service and financial responsibility and I wanted to bring that mindset here.”

Key managers are from Disney's park operations and Universal Studios as well as from healthcare, senior dining and contract management. One is a former nutrition director at the Florida Dept. of Education.