Inspiration at salad bar

It’s hard not to be inspired after talking with Jessica Shelly. She’s Cincinnati Public Schools’ director of food services, one of United Fresh’s Produce Excellence in Foodservice Award winners for 2012.

In her earlier life, she was a registered environmental health specialist, which meant she was an investigator on foodborne illness outbreaks. She went on to become a training specialist and was eventually hired to be supervisor of training and compliance for the school district. In 2010, the director of food services retired, and Shelly got the job.

With her background, Shelly obviously puts a lot of emphasis on food safety – one of the reasons she likes fresh-cut products. She’s also focused on promoting the consumption of fresh produce among the district’s 33,000 students.

One way she’s done that is by setting up salad bars in all 53 Cincinnati schools. That’s the inspiring part. Salad bars weren’t in the budget cards. So she applied for grants and sought donations and within a year, each school had one. United Fresh helped, as did Chiquita. Other benefactors included a local university that was looking for a way to improve the community.

“I had two schools in their neighborhood, so I called them up, and they went ahead and bought two salad bars,” Shelly said. “It’s looking for those opportunities and saying, ‘Hey, can you help out?'”

Through a partnership with a local group, families in three schools so far now have the option to pick up a $10 box of fresh produce for $5 once a week. Shelly orders extra through suppliers and the project is subsidized by the partnership.

“I akin it to market day,” she said. “We have parents who now would never buy produce anywhere, buying produce.”

Meanwhile, United Fresh’s “A Salad Bar in Every School” has a goal to increase children’s fresh fruit and vegetable consumption by raising private funds to donate salad bars to schools across the U.S.

It’s because of such efforts that leaders like Shelly can share sweet stories of an inner-city second-grader asking when jicama will be on the salad bar again, or of the little boy who has discovered that he loves sliced radishes on his hamburger because they’re “spicy, like hot sauce.”

“I think it’s made a huge impact on our kids,” she said. “I can see it every day.” Like I said, inspiring.

                                                                                                         –Kathy Gibbons, editorial director