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The days of cafeteria food being comically, or not so comically, bad might be over — at least for the Redwood City School District.
In less than a year, the district has undergone a major overhaul of its cafeteria system, substituting predominantly pre-packaged meals with fresh-cut, global foods.
For roughly 30 years, many considered the quality of the Redwood City School District’s cafeteria food to be subpar, at best. But one local mom, Jessica Shade, has taken that system to the chopping block.
Shade’s daughter started Kindergarten at Orion Alternative School in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was well underway and health was top of mind.
“The menu looked like what you might find at a fast food restaurant,” the mom said. “It was a rotation of corn dogs, chicken nuggets and cheeseburgers.”
The danger there, Shade said, was that many students who rely on the school nutrition program weren’t eating because “it wasn’t good.” Students viewed it as “gross” and “uncool” to consume.
Eager to improve the nutritional content and taste of school meals, Shade reached out to her school community and solicited interest from parents, teachers, and staff to form the Healthy School Meals Coalition to replace the old cafeteria system. Roughly 30 adults in the district “were just looking for a match to start the flame.”
The common thread among other districts that have done school meals right, the coalition found, is that they run operations “in-house,” rather than through a for-profit third-party that would charge “steep fees,” according to Shade. Redwood City School District had the multinational French company Sodexo Group calling the shots for nearly 30 years.
Despite the difficulty of change and the risks associated with it, the district ultimately decided to cancel its contract with Sodexo Group June 30, 2024, following countless conversations and meetings with Shade and her coalition.
Instead, the district hired an in-house Child Nutrition Services Director, Richie Wilim Jr., and months later, Wilim recruited Fernando Guzman to manage the toss. The nearly $1 million in special Kitchen Infrastructure and Training funds awarded to the district in 2022 helped fuel this transition, as the District could install more efficient and safer kitchen equipment and better train staff for more demanding cooking.
“Now, we actually use knives,” Guzman joked, referring to the decades of pre-packaged meal prep.
Guzman hails from a background of fine-dining, which involved delicately cooking for one plate at a time, with just several dozen orders in a day’s work. At the district, around 8,500 meals are prepared every day.
Beyond the fulfillment Guzman finds through contributing to the community, he’s also dedicated to helping children learn even during lunchtime, by challenging their palates.
On any given day, students might stumble upon pickled jalapenos, “Quesabirria,” Philly Cheesesteaks, roasted cauliflower, Chinese fried rice or 70s-style beef tacos.
Guzman likes to adapt recipes from foreign cuisines that most students may have never tried, so as not to overload their young taste buds. For example, on tikka masala day, his kitchen placed a bag full of cardamom, cinnamon, Star Anise, and other Indian spices into the Basmati rice to subtly aromatize it, rather than mixing in the spices full-force.
The Child Nutrition Services manager remembers the first time he served the students chicken tinga tacos. He had “nightmares” about them rejecting the tacos because he figured they were unfamiliar. However, he was delighted to say the team served about 250, and 300 the next time, and 350 the time after that, indicating student support.
“It is a snowball effect in a way,” Guzman said, of how it just takes a few kids to try a new dish and recommend it to their friends before it’s favored by the masses.
And the proof is in the pudding — as more and more kids are opting in to cafeteria meals, and actually finishing their plates rather than throwing the food out, Ana Lidia Torres, the food service lead at Hoover Elementary School, said in Spanish.
Torres said she’s been grateful, “agradecimiento,” hearing the kids call the food she prepares very good, “muy rica,” instead of ugly, “feo,” like they used to.
Tastebud training is not the only priority for the Child Nutrition Services team; Healthfulness matters as well. For this reason, the kitchen only cooks with whole-muscle meat that’s free of additives and hormones. Whole wheat grains are used more often, and natural sugars, like those in bananas, are used to sweeten treats like morning muffins.
Most ingredients are sourced in-state, and the team prioritizes seasonal produce when possible. Moreover, Guzman said most of the produce is free of chemicals — “when there’s the option to buy organic, we buy organic.”
“The low hanging fruit was the fruit,” Guzman said, adding that swapping out juice and soda for natural fruits was one way the district cafeterias have opted to keep meals as natural as possible.
The students have taken to the school food like never before.
Roy Cloud School sixth-grader Audrey Kolar called the new chicken sandwich “so good” because she likes to “take the chicken out of the bread” and eat it like a “giant, tasty chicken nugget.”
Max Tower,10, also really likes the new chicken the cafeteria uses.
“It used to be terrible food,” Max said of the new school food program. “Now it has gotten much better and has become a variety of very tasty food that I’m always excited for after a long day at school.”
Shade said she gets texts “almost weekly” from parents who say: “What’s up with my kid wanting roasted Brussels sprouts?”
Not only are school meals community organizers proud of the fact that kids are learning what healthy meals look like and “bringing that home to their parents,” Shade said, but also that their learning in general can benefit from nutrient-rich meals.
“One of the things that we heard from teachers consistently is when the kids eat a bunch of sugar, they don’t come back ready to learn,” the mom said. “There were teachers who were really concerned about kids’ ability to learn without food in them.”
Extremely proud of all the progress Shade and her coalition, which has grown to over a hundred participants, have made, the local mother is thrilled to “celebrate” grassroots change at a time when it feels like there’s constantly “more bad news.”
In 2021, California became the first state in the country to offer free breakfast and lunch to all public school students from Kindergarten to 12th grade. This initiative, School Meals for All, has stood the test of time, unlike many other states that have phased out pandemic-era student meal plans. Such state funding has been crucial to transforming the Redwood City School District’s food system.
While the cafeterias do not yet participate in a compost program, the nutrition services director said he was interested in exploring one. At the moment, school cafeterias are limited to recycling and landfill-filling.
To learn more about the district’s new cafeteria program, visit the Redwood City School District’s Department of Child Nutrition Services webpage.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of the name of a student and to clarify the cancellation of a contract.
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Everything in this article is true, that the food is much better but what they don’t say is that employees are overworked because they have to prepare everything from scratch and they don’t have even have time to really take lunch and breaks. That is what parents and community don’t know and the district don’t say. and they are not hiring more people. Very sad.
The return of RCSD’s remarkable food program is wonderful news. The children are the ones who truly benefit, and that’s what matters most. With a large portion of RCSD students relying on school meals as their primary source of nutrition, this marks a significant step in the right direction.
While this shift undoubtedly increases the workload for kitchen staff, the core mission has always been to provide children with healthy, nourishing meals. It raises an important question, did staff hours increase accordingly, or did their responsibilities simply grow, transitioning from heating prepackaged frozen foods to preparing more meals from scratch?
A review of the school menus, conveniently available on each school’s website, shows a thoughtful balance between freshly cooked and premade items. If the district’s food vendors are indeed supplying high-quality ingredients, then students receive better meals while staff maintain a reasonable workload. That combination makes this initiative a true win-win for everyone involved.