Talking Taters at Fairfax School Salad Bar Celebration
The National Potato Council and United Fresh Start Foundation joined students, teachers and school administrators at Lemon Road Elementary School in Falls Church, Virginia, on November 8 for a “Celebration of Potatoes” lunchtime event. Kindergarten students learned how and where potatoes are grown, about different varieties, as well as potato nutrition benefits. All students also enjoyed a Greek-inspired potato salad from the school’s new salad bar.
“Potatoes are highly nutritious cost-effective vegetables that kids love to eat. Salad bars empower schools to offer healthy potato options that meet all K-12 school foodservice guidelines,” said Kam Quarles, Vice President, Public Policy, National Potato Council. “We are proud to help Fairfax schools achieve their nutrition goals by introducing kids to new ways of enjoying potatoes.”
Earlier this year, the National Potato Council partnered with the United Fresh Start Foundation to provide three salad bars to the Fairfax County Public Schools, as part of the national Salad Bars to Schools initiative. The donations also are part of a larger, multi-year potato industry campaign, which, over the past three years, has provided salad bars to more than 300 schools across the country. Recipient schools receive salad bars along with potato recipes, serving suggestions and other materials to assist K-12 school foodservice operators with incorporating potatoes on their menu.
“The potato industry has been a valuable partner in helping to provide salad bars to schools across the country,” said Andrew Marshall, United Fresh’s Director of Foodservice & Foundation Partnerships, representing the United Fresh Start Foundation. “The generosity of potato growers, and the forethought of the potato industry to educate children about the different ways they can enjoy potatoes has yielded a successful partnership for all parties involved.”
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Fairfax County Public Schools is the 10th largest school district in the country. Under the leadership of Rodney Taylor, the district’s nationally recognized Food and Nutrition Services Director, the Fairfax school district serves breakfast, lunch, supper and snacks, in nearly 200 schools throughout the county. Taylor’s goal since he started in the district in 2015, has been to have a salad bar in every elementary school. The district’s initial request for more than 140 salad bars has since been significantly whittled-down, thanks in-part to United Fresh, produce industry supporters and Salad Bars to Schools partners.
“We greatly appreciate the produce industry, supporters of the national Salad Bars to Schools initiative, as well as our local partners, who all have helped to make salad bars an important part of our school nutrition program,” said Rodney. “The salad bars give us the ability to increase offerings and encourage kids to choose fresh produce every time they eat with us. And guess what? They do!”
U.S. Department of Agriculture nutrition standards for school lunch require offering students a variety of colorful fruits and vegetables each week. Salad bars provide an easy way for schools to meet this requirement. Children significantly increase their fruit and vegetable consumption when given a variety of choices in a school salad bar, and when offered multiple fruit and vegetable choices they respond by incorporating greater variety and increasing their overall consumption.
The United Fresh Start Foundation is a founding partner of the national Salad Bars to Schools initiative, working with the produce industry, foundations and allied businesses to support salad bars for schools, as a strategy for increasing children’s access to fresh fruits and vegetables every day. To date, salad bars have been donated to more than 5,300 schools, benefiting 3 million children in all 50 states. For more information about the United Fresh Start Foundation or to specifically support the Salad Bars to Schools initiative, visit www.unitedfreshstart.org or contact Andrew Marshall, Director of Foodservice & Foundation Partnerships, United Fresh Produce Association at amarshall@unitedfresh.org or 202.303.3407.
Olive Roots: A Bridge from Greece to the U.S.
By Lorrie Baumann
Katerina Barka wants Americans to know that there’s more to the Mediterranean diet, and to Greek food in particular, than olives and olive oil. To really appreciate that fact, though, they’ll need access to products that are authentically Greek rather than “Greek-style,” and that means that somebody’s got to go to Greece and fetch them back to the United States. She says she’s that person, and her company, Olive Roots, is the vehicle she launched at this year’s Summer Fancy Food Show to do that.
Barka herself is as much of a Greek import as the products she’s bringing to the States. She grew up in Greece, went to college there, and came to the U.S. only after she’d graduated from college and needed to figure out what to do next with her life. While searching online for options for further education, she came across a Harvard University postgraduate course in international business, enrolled in the program, and came to Boston. There, she later completed her degree in finance at Boston College and then went to work at as a wealth manager for an American firm.
Six years later, it was an encounter with one of her wealthy clients that changed the direction of her life. She presented him with a bottle of her family’s olive oil. His reaction to the gift, and to the oil itself, sparked a chain reaction that led to her decision to abandon an interesting and successful career in finance for the risky proposition of starting her own business in the food industry. “At that moment, I realized that you can do any job you want, but when you do great, it’s when you’re doing what you love,” she said.
She and her husband, another Greek native that she’d met in Boston, picked up their lives and moved them back to Cyprus, where her husband has family, and then to mainland Greece, which is closer to the farmers who grow her ingredients. She found farmers and artisanal food producers who were making amazing products but who didn’t have the expertise to navigate the bureaucratic requirements of exporting them to the United States. Back in the United States, she found buyers who were willing to sell Greek products to the American market but who had grown frustrated with the difficulties of working with small producers inexperienced in managing an international supply chain. What they both needed, she discovered, was a bridge between the two groups, and that’s the role that she sees for herself and Olive Roots.
Her initial product line, which she’s just started to sell in the U.S., consists of authentic Greek products sourced from small producers who make the foods that comprise the Greek version of the Mediterranean diet, which, compared to the usual American diet, contains more olive oil to salads and other dishes, more fish and less meat. “The Greek diet is full of vegetarian and vegan food options,” Barka said. “More than half the days of the week, we eat vegetarian meals – we just don’t notice, because they are Mama’s recipes.”
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The company’s first products to market include marinated sardines packed in olive oil. “They are a tasty way to eat fish,” Barka said, in addition to containing about 10 meals’ worth of Omega 3 fatty acids per serving.
The company also offers a line of dried mushrooms – both cultivated and wild varieties, including a powdered mushroom line that’s used in cooking to add flavor and umami to dishes – and an Organic Grape Syrup that was named a best food at the Summer Fancy Food Show by the editors of Culture magazine. “It’s a great replacement for honey on pancakes or waffles,” Barka said.
Among other products, Olive Roots also offers EON Pine Honey with Mastic, the MELIMA line of handmade Greek pasta and LACONIAN LEGACY monovarietal extra virgin olive oil from Sparta. The newest release, one that Barka is very excited about, is a dip called Greek Salad in a Jar. All of the products are created from simple, everyday authentic ingredients. Barka said, “There’s nothing weird in any of our jars or packages.”
Most of the farmers who grow the ingredients for the products and the producers who package them for the market are Greek women, Barka said. “It just happened,” she added. “With this team of women, we can only succeed.”
Find our more about Olive Roots by visiting www.myoliveroots.com or email Barka at katerina@myoliveroots.com.
Can Big Data Make Better Berries?
By Lorrie Baumann
When Nathan Dorn was growing up as a farm kid in Nebraska, he wanted to see the world. Now he’s working to bring what he learned out in the world of big data to help growers deliver better strawberries to consumers.
Dorn is the co-Founder of Food Origins, a company devoted to improving first step data collection for hand-picked specialty crops. His vision extends much further than better traceability. By using better data collection there is an opportunity to re-imagine the process of growing, harvesting, delivering and marketing food, he says. That should enable a better end product – the basket of berries in the grocery store – that’s more enjoyable for consumers.
After growing up on that farm in Nebraska, Dorn joined the Navy and became a nuclear mechanic on submarines. Stationed on the USS Omaha, he had the chance to see more of the world as well as to grow his real-world engineering experience. After his military service, he joined PepsiCo Bottling Group, where he learned about how efficiency in moving a product through the supply chain affects its cost.
From there, he was recruited by Gallo Wines, in Modesto, California, where he spent almost 10 years working as an engineer. “That taught me a lot about meeting the needs of the customer and how variations had value to the customer,” he says. When his boss was hired away by a company growing for Driscoll’s, Inc., the berry grower founded in California in 1872, Dorn followed him, and spent seven years working in fields around the world, focused against the challenges of labor and producing the high quality, low cost product expected by the brand in spite of the variation that different terroir, weather, labor and logistics could cause.
Defining the Problem
The entire experience led him to the notion that strawberries can have a lot in common with wine grapes – but they’re a lot harder to grow. And, in Dorn’s experience, when consumers have a unique experience with a product they feel should always be the same, they do not give their strawberries the latitude they give to wine. “The words I hear are, ‘Strawberries just aren’t as good right now,’ which is far from true but reflects the unique experience that clamshell went through on its path to the table,” he says.
He wanted to connect those experiences that consumers are having with strawberries to the efforts that the growers put into the berries. “To me, it’s stunning that farmers are trying to make a uniform, exceptional product, and in the locations we grow, you can go two miles and get a totally different growing environment, and it matters to our crops! To top it off, every day is like a whole new growing year. Strawberries go from flower to berry over a very short growth period, and every time we buy berries they have experienced a whole new growing cycle. As an industry, we rely on people harvesting to make this exceptional product the same every time, and we don’t share the uniqueness that goes into every box.”
Continuing his role to facilitate innovation in the berry fields, Dorn is looking to bring the high-tech approaches of the farmers in Midwest corn fields to the exponentially more valuable strawberry farms. “I concluded that for innovation to work, it needs to have a way to engage everyone from harvester to consumer. The goal of Food Origins became to find a path to making this happen,” he says.
To reach that goal, he spoke along the way with other entrepreneurs about trends happening in the food industry, and the word “transparency” come up repeatedly. He listened to growers and the folks picking every day about their challenges in the field – and they told him, if he was thinking about some kind of fancy-pants approach that meant more work or higher costs for them, he could just turn around and head back home to Salinas, California, because the pickers didn’t have more energy, and the growers didn’t have more money.
Thinking Through the Problem
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“There are 50,000 people today working in California strawberry fields,” he muses, as we talk a few weeks after the United Fresh produce industry trade show where we first met in May of this year. “What’s the impact of equipping all of them with data collection?” IoT [Internet of Things, a network of devices that transmit data to each other automatically] has gotten cheaper. “Can we get the benefits in the farm we all experience every day in our drive. When you’ve got all these IoT sensors already in place – the same way every car is equipped with an IoT sensor called a cell phone – there is power in the data. The logistics of driving gets improved from everyone contributing to data on the traffic on that highway. I believe that our farms can benefit equally when we go down that path.”
Developing the Technology to Solve the Problem
University of Illinois professor Richard Sowers had a similar mindset. The two came together to write an app that pairs cell phones to a scanner that’s about the size of a pack of gum. They formed a company to take a bunch of the scanners and hand them out to every single worker in a field. “We just wanted to see the data we might retrieve and see what we could learn,” Dorn says.
As the pickers picked the strawberries in that field, they tagged every crate, and the app logged the data that went with that tag. “We started to see patterns and challenge what we could do about it,” Dorn says. “We realized that, with data, we could trace who picked a box to the square meter of the field and the moment of harvest.”
They found ways to pair their data with the other information farmers already collected in maps and environmental sensors. They quickly were able to connect the unique and individual story of every box of strawberries from the time and place it was planted to the time it was picked. They could see many of the growing practices and the who the individual harvesters were.
“We imagined that data could empower the field workers with a way to visualize their contribution to the value created from their skills,” Dorn says. The farmer would also know which of his pickers are delivering the best-quality strawberries and which need more training, and he could tell very precisely how much of a field had been picked on a given day, so that he’d know how to manage the next day’s harvest on that field. “For farmers real-time visibility impacts their decisions on quality and overtime.
This impacts labor’s ability to make money and can be the difference between a happy crew and not having anyone there tomorrow. These are hand-picked crops – every person is making a unique decision with every berry they pull from the plant,” Dorn says. “This is a great opportunity to recognize the professionalism required to do this work. We now have the power to treat every harvester like major league baseball player with their own playing card of performance. This will make everyone more empowered and focused on similar goals. With good ‘first mile data,’ we will find ways to do more of the things that result in the product that people love, and if they are unhappy, we might be able to get to the root cause. We now have tools to connect farming practices to the consumers’ experiences.”
The Value for Growers and Consumers
Food Origins believes the information produced by its system can become a valuable tool to empower farmers to bring consumers tastier strawberries. “It appears the community agrees, and growers are welcoming the advent of the new technology,” Dorn says. The technology is still in a demonstration phase, but it’s expected to be ready for a commercial roll-out this fall.
“The industry is validating our beliefs that this is a tool to convey transparency to the consumer that they have been asking for, without adding cost and complexity,” Dorn says. “Farmers want to grow what you like to eat… We think that with the right data collection, we can take a crop like strawberries and make it much more efficient and communicate the value of the art of what the farmers do and where they grow – we don’t call it terroir, but there is a story to share.”