AT A GLANCE Name: St. Paul (MN) Public Schools Enrollment: 38,000 School Sites: 58 Free/Reduced Pct.: 73% Meals/Day: 50,000 Participation (lunch): 80% (elem.), 85% (middle), 70% (high school) Budget: $21 million Food Cost: 34% Administration: Jean Ronnei (director), Monica Bunde (nutrition center mgr.), Amy Thering (business systems mgr.), Nancy Conway, Dawn George, Pat Mergens (nutrition services coordinators), Geoff Adams, Caron Atkinson, Jacque Karas, Dennis Schaffhausen (nutrition center supervisors), Jim Groskopf (purchasing analyst), Mari Lowry (quality control specialist), Dianne Wortz (project mgr.)

Jean Ronnei is comfortable with microphones, tape recorders, TV cameras, reporter's notebooks and the full panoply of the modern media monster. It comes with the territory when you lead one of the benchmark school nutrition programs in the country at a time when nutrition has become a national obsession.

Ronnei, director of nutrition & commercial services for St. Paul (MN) Public Schools (SPPS), spends a fair amount of time talking about her program, and about school nutrition issues in general. That's because SPPS is able to combine a healthful, varied menu that consistently comes in within budget, with nearly 80 percent lunch participation across the board.

Like a Restaurant

No wonder everyone wants to know how they do it!

The answer begins with Ronnei, who has been in her position since 1990 after an earlier foodservice career that included stops in B&I and restaurants as well as a medical center. This powerful mix of in-segment and out-of-segment experience makes her conversant both in the particular issues driving school foodservice and in out-of-the-box solutions. It has already won her accolades from the School Nutrition Association (SNA) and from her peers; and she was named FAME Golden School Foodservice Director of the Year in 2007.

“To me, this is no different than running a restaurant or a B&I operation,” she offers. “I think we're looking at the same kinds of things. Getting a customer to come back again means that the food had to taste like they expected, the service had to be good and they had to feel respected.”

It's not easy, especially given school nutrition economics, but St. Paul Nutrition & Commercial Services is a well-oiled machine staffed by a veteran administrative crew that has worked hard to leverage every conceivable advantage — from technology and economies of scale to shrewd purchasing and available community resources — to keep costs in check while continuously tinkering with the product to keep the menu fresh and interesting within the necessary nutritional parameters.

Finding Foods That Fit

At the core is an initiative called Healthy Hits that formalizes the process through which SPPS is able to keep its school menus refreshed with new, healthy, kid-friendly choices. Nutrition Services also is highly adept at marketing its services under an umbrella brand called Real Choices. It uses everything from old fashioned posters and flyers to sophisticated audio-visual productions that range from explaining the department's mission and initiatives to parents, administrators and the community at large, to productions introducing students to how to navigate the lunch line, how to recycle and how to participate in the grab-and-go breakfast program.

St. Paul may not be a mega sized city, but it's not exactly small town either. Its 38,000 students, spread among 58 school sites, are a Rainbow Coalition of modern America, with three quarters of the enrollment consisting of minorities, including sizeable numbers from several distinct ethnic groups with particular customs and needs. These include the Hmong from Southeast Asia, and Somalis from Eastern Africa who are mostly Muslim.

Also, like most large urban districts, St. Paul is disproportionately poor and suffers from the nutrition-related issues like obesity and Type 2 diabetes that plague such demographics. That makes nutrition and teaching healthy eating habits a core mission.

This is where Healthy Hits is crucial. Using the slogan “Real Choices,” the district emphasizes foods that are both appealing and healthful, that mimic popular commercial items and that give customers a positive experience.

Under Healthy Hits, the nutrition team researches healthful menu additions that are also kid-friendly and cost-effective, which means using federal commodities and/or inexpensive, in-season local produce. Then, they must be formulated so they can be made efficiently (for the process details, Finding the Healthy Hits).

The improvements are often incremental — brown rice for white, romaine and spinach for iceberg lettuce on salad bars. “Our goal is 10 healthful menu changes a year,” Ronnei says.

The menu innovations involve not just familiar but healthier items but also fairly esoteric ones that target specific groups.

“I had gotten criticism from a school board member during a meeting that our menus didn't represent student population, and I thought he had a good point,” Ronnei recalls. “Not being experts in ethnic dishes, we partnered with Ramsey County Health Department, which helped us find local people who could create authentic recipes.” Among the partners were a Hispanic foods company and a Thai woman who owned her own restaurant.

SPPS worked with these partners to tailor their recipes to the limitations: central production, procurement, food cost, labor capabilities.

“Finding recipes is not easy,” Ronnei says. “To this day that is a very challenging part of the puzzle.”

The issue is not just cost, she emphasizes, but finding ingredients that are cost-effective and versatile enough so they can be used up in other ways. The dishes must also hold up on the serving lines through hours-long lunch periods and have enough kid appeal to justify their place on the menu.

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