In photos, school meals from last year.
This school year, the Washoe County School District is moving on from prison supplier Aramark to Southwest Foodservice Excellence as its meal provider.
Announcements on the district’s website were made of a one year contract in May but those links are no longer active. From what we could tell in the metadata, the contract is reported to be for an estimated 60-thousand students and 8.5 million meals.
SFE is a private company headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, providing outsourced food services to K-12 public schools in over 30 states.
Like any massive company, it’s faced controversy, including being criticized for having inadequate portion sizes for its meals and alleged employee mistreatment.
Locally, there’s been a push to reduce all the waste and throwing out of plastic created by school meals, so we will be monitoring the quality and portions of the meals this upcoming school year as well as sustainability efforts. Let us know as well how it goes if you have kids eating these meals.
A sustainability page on the district’s website indicated styrofoam trays and packaging were eliminated during the just concluded Aramark tenure. It also reported single-use plastics, such as plastic milk straws and wrappers were reduced. The page says 25% of produce was being sourced within 250 miles of the district, a number sustainability advocates would like to see lifted much higher.
The page says 60% of schools “have implemented share tables, allowing students to donate unopened, uneaten food to others instead of throwing it away,” but the actual result of that change is not indicated.
Last year we advocated for a county wide farm to school movement for all district school meals with reusable plates and cutlery as part of our Ideas for Progress series, to benefit local growers, the environment and kids, but that type of bold thinking doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
