NYC schools catering to a more healthful image

Nation's Restaurant News, June 21, 2004 by Paul King

NEW YORK -- As school officials nationwide come under fire from parents and consumer groups demanding more healthful meal offerings, the nation's largest public school system is on its way to quelling the outcry.

With last month's hiring of Jorge Collazo as executive chef, the Office of School Food Nutritional Services, or OSFNS, here has sent a clear message that it is serious about improving the quality and nutritional value of the meals served to students in this city's 1,500 schools.

Collazo's arrival is the latest step in a process begun in 2002 by Mayor Michael Bloomberg when he took control of New York City's public schools. He believed that the system's foodservice program could be handled in one of two ways: It could be run more like a business or be outsourced to a business.

Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein decided to opt for the former course. Nearly 18 months ago they hired Martin Oestreicher, gave him the title of chief executive of OSFNS and charged him with putting together a team to improve the system's financial performance and its customer appeal.

Collazo, 54, was an instructor at the New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier, Vt., when he was tapped by Oestreicher to develop recipes and set policy for the $370 million school foodservice program.

"This is a major step, a radical step for us," said Oestreicher, who has a passion for nutrition. "We have customers, just like any restaurant. But we didn't have anyone cooking for us on a large scale who is a chef, someone who can make policy, develop recipes, train and motivate our cooks. Now we do."

The new role at OSFNS is the largest job the Cuban-born Collazo has undertaken. He has cooked for a law firm, a prep school and a four-star hotel, in addition to teaching aspiring chefs at NECI. But none has made him earn his keep as quickly as New York City has: in his first three weeks he visited 40 schools, less than 3 percent of the cafeterias under his charge. The pace has invigorated him, he said.

"I'm excited because nutrition has been a concern of mine for years," said Collazo, who noted that as a child of the 1960s, "I still have that social consciousness in me.

He added: "What has been in the forefront of my mind recently is the epidemic of childhood obesity that we are faced with. Here I feel I can make a difference. All the elements are in place for success. We just need a system to bring it all together."

Before hiring Collazo, Oestreicher hired as executive director David Berkowitz, a 25-year veteran of the Philadelphia-based food management giant Aramark. Oestreicher and Berkowitz wasted little time implementing the business plan desired by Bloomberg.They gave individual managers their own budgets and profit-and-loss statements, which Oestreicher noted "is practically unheard of in government."

"We want managers to look at their operations like franchises," he said. "Instead of having this one massive centralized budget, each school has to monitor its revenue and expenses. The more kids you serve, the more revenue comes in. You watch your employee absenteeism, because that can add to your labor costs."

At the same time, they began developing ways to give managers more flexibility in areas such as menu planning.

"A core of our business is improving the nutrition of kids, but in order to do that, you need to know what they want," Berkowitz said. "So we want to get managers out talking with students, find out what they're eating, why they're not eating."

The goal is to establish menu guidelines, he added, and then let managers plan menus that fit the taste profiles of their customers.

"In some areas of Brooklyn, for instance, they like Caribbean chicken. It's less popular on Staten Island," Berkowitz added. "So, what we want to be able to do is say, if you're on Staten Island and you want to make chicken teriyaki, do it. If you're in the south Bronx or Brooklyn and you want jerk chicken, do it. We want them to have the mind-set of entrepreneurs."

Another example will be on the salad bar, a haphazard effort in most schools. Collazo has been asked to design a basic salad bar template, so that there can be a standard to which to refer for presentation ideas.

"Then managers will have choices, such as whether to put on potato salad, macaroni salad or coleslaw," Berkowitz said. "Do you want green beans, chick peas or kidney beans?"

The fact that the average age of a school building in New York City is 65 years old handicaps OSFNS. That means that in all but the newest schools, anything more complex than a convection oven is nonexistent. As a result, OSFNS works very closely with food manufacturers to develop entree items and side dishes to its nutrition and taste specifications that then simply can be heated in kitchens.

"We would like to do more scratch cooking, and over time maybe we can," Berkowitz said. "For now the goal is to provide students with more healthful food that they will eat."

There have been a few success stories over the past school year. For example, OSFNS implemented a universal free-breakfast program in all its schools, with "astounding" results," according to Berkowitz.