Portland, Oregon receives more than 36" of rain each year, but the foodservice program in its schools is anything but all wet. In fact, it's moving so fast, the rain falls mainly on the local foods it buys, prepares and serves.

And for Portland Public Schools (PPS), what has consistently driven decisions is data. The decision to open its central kitchen nearly three decades ago, to close it more recently, on how to reorganize operations, and even the right way to design menus that feature locally grown and processed food are based on hard numbers. So it comes as no surprise that they are also pioneering new concepts in how to use data day-to-day.

The Central Argument

In 1980 Portland was in the vanguard of school foodservice, building one of the nation's first central kitchens based on a cook-chill system.

Kristy Obbink remembers it well. She had started working for the district the year before in a career shift after her initial years as an administrative dietician in healthcare. Bob Honson, a co-worker when Kristy started and soon to become the district's foodservice director, was tasked with getting the new kitchen up and running. (Honson retired in 2004 after more than twenty years in the FSD's position.)

At A Glance: PORTLAND PUBLIC SCHOOLS www.nutrition.pps.k12.or.us Annual Foodservice Budget: $13 million Enrollment: 46,000 Sites: 10 HS; 11 MS; 66 K5 or K8 Breakfast ADP: 13,000 Lunch ADP: 20,000 Free and Reduced: 45.1% Foodservice Staff: 95 full-time; 130 part-time Note: PPS has the shortest public school year in the country, 169 serving days, which affects the distribution of of the district's fixed costs. The district offers a summer feeding program at about 35 sites.

There were two reasons Portland opted for building a central kitchen. The first was that the district had decided to build new administrative offices: by including the kitchen in those plans, it was possible to offset some of the construction costs with foodservice funds. The second and more important reason: central production analysis numbers clearly indicated that the district could save money by closing many of its individual school site kitchens. The move was definitely data-driven.

“Cook-chill central kitchens were a new concept, and we were learning along the way,” says Obbink. One learning curve began immediately, when the district decided not to hire specialized staff for the new food manufacturing facility. Instead, it chose to train existing staff from the original decentralized kitchens to take on the new responsibilities.

In retrospect, that may not have been such a great idea. The first batch of spaghetti made in the gigantic kettles, bagged and quick-chilled, came out like “pink mush” because the pasta wasn't correctly specified or prepared for use in the new cooking process. But, over time, the department got such procedures right and a whole lot more. Honson went on to win the prestigious IFMA Gold Plate Award.

2004: A Year of Transition

As many districts have come to realize, cooking is a costly enterprise. While some districts that had moved to central production are considering a return to the site-based, cook-from-scratch menus some local communities are demanding in the name of health and nutrition, the reality is that they then lose the economies of scale central production offered.

On the other hand, for districts that write tight and nutrition-based specs, prepared items from a manufacturer need be no less healthful or acceptable than district-cooked items. Many districts have also found that it is growing harder to recruit and maintain staff with the skills needed for volume food production, and to ensure that all items are prepared consistently for quality and safety. That also has become a factor encouraging districts to turn more frequently to high-quality processed items.

That was the case in Portland. In 2004, the year Obbink became director, she took a hard look at the schools' menus and discovered the department had already moved away from many of the items originally produced in the central kitchen. She also found herself in the position of having to re-evaluate many of the other factors that had led PPS to the central production model.

For one thing, district administration had come to believe that the main building it occupied represented a potentially valuable piece of real estate. It had made a decision to to investigate the property's sale, along with a plan to relocate district offices. Because the central kitchen was an anchor weighing down that decision, the administration had also decided to close that facility and investigate whether outsourcing the meal program or its production might be part of a solution.

Honson had retired the previous year and, with a newly appointed director in place, it was a good time to make big changes, they thought.

Newly promoted, Obbink was up to the challenge. She helped the district put together a Request for Information (RFI) to see what alternative possibilities might exist. At the same time, she worked with PPS Nutrition Services Department to develop an in-house proposal based on a major re-structuring of the school nutrition program.

A major premise was that the decision to close the central kitchen was a done deal; other changes included increased use of pre-prepared food, for the most part finished off at the school sites, with relocation of and some reductions in staff. All told, the plan projected that the district would be able to achieve savings of a half million dollars a year. And, by eliminating the need for the central kitchen, freed the district to investigate the sale of the main site property.

It was the best solution the district received and was the one it adopted. Today, the school nutrition department is thriving, although the district still occupies the same facilities. (The cook chill equipment was sold, and, at least for now, the original kitchen serves to package breakfasts and as a central distribution facility for the schools).