A Salad Bar Success Case Study: St. Dominic & St. Luke in Oakville, Ontario

SB: The idea behind this model was to make it easier to control the finances and not have to worry the school secretary with an abundance of invoices & receipts to be paid each week. We (Stacey and Jill) also set the salad program up so that it would generate its own money to help sustain the program after the grant was done and also to help support students who couldn’t afford to pay for the lunch (these students are always chosen by the Principal).

Basically, the salad program costs families $5 / student / week. From that, the salad fund gets $1, which leaves us with $4 per student per week for food costs. We invoice the school at the start of each salad session for the total amount.Example:

• 200 students enroll for a 12-week session
• The school would collect from families: 200 students x $5 x 12 weeks = $12,000
• We would invoice the school for: 200 students x $4 x 12 weeks = $9,600 to buy the food and run the program
• The remaining $2,400 would stay in the school salad fund

SB:
Weekly ordering systems – I have a background in Purchasing in the foodservice industry, so I know from working with chain restaurants that it’s important to have the same people in charge of ordering and maintaining inventory on a weekly basis. It’s a big commitment sometimes for one person, so it’s good to share this responsibility with maybe one other, because it’s not only ordering and maintaining inventory, but also ensuring that the food arrives on time and the correct quantity for salad day, and looking after the budget and paying the invoices. With produce, the weekly prices can fluctuate without notice so it’s important to know where you stand in your budget, etc. I think it’s also important to work with trusted suppliers. We have built up great relationships with our 3 main sources and trust that they can provide our quantities every week.

Dealing with lines & timing –  At St. Dominic, the lunch period runs from 11:20-11:40 a.m. We have 2 salad carts that are 6 ft long on wheels (1 youth size, 1 adult size). The carts are stocked and set up in the school’s secondary gym by 11:10 a.m. The food on the carts is double-sided, essentially creating 4 “lanes” for traffic. We also use 2 folding 6 ft tables for the overflow (protein, grains & salad dressing). 

The school secretary calls the students by grades but they don’t all come at once. We typically start with grade 6-8 (they’re faster and usually have clubs/sports that they have to get to), followed by grade 1 & 2 (they’re slower at the carts and take longer to eat), then our grade 3-5’s (they’re normally our biggest group). Then our kindergarten classes (5 in total) come to the carts, they have a later lunch time and it is also a safer environment for them without the “big” kids in the gym!  By the end, we were getting approximately 165 students through in 13 minutes.

As our program grew, another thing that the school did was allow the students to come back to the gym (after 11:40am) to finish eating. A teacher was assigned to monitor them as we cleaned up the carts. The students would typically have an additional 20 minutes to finish eating and for some, it allowed them to get seconds!

Food distribution & minimizing food waste – We always found it pretty quick to figure out how much we needed each week. Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t perfect and at times ran out or had way too much.  We managed to know the amount of lettuce, cucumbers, carrots and tomatoes that we needed because we served it every week. Also, if there were leftovers of carrots & tomatoes, we could typically save them to use for the following Wednesday. Sometimes, we’d run out of one of the cut fruits or veggies but there was always enough of the other options on the cart to choose from that no one ever went without a full lunch (that’s something that we learned after a few times, don’t sweat it, no one is going without). Another thing we try to do is portion or piece control with our grain & proteins each week. If it was a popular protein (taco meat, for example) we would serve it to the students to prevent over indulgers and ensure everyone got some! The other key factor that helped us with food waste was that every student had the same reusable container, so if they had leftovers, they’d put the lid on and it would go home. 

Promotion – We did a variety of things to promote the program:

• Free Salad – for our 1st year with the cart we set-up the “Crunch Cafe”. Over 3 days we had every class come through the cafe and enjoy a free salad (scaled down version). In our 2nd year, we did “Crunch on the Go” – we set-up the salad carts and students could help themselves to free pre-packaged salads, fruits & proteins. The Crunch on the Go ran at lunch every Friday in May and each Friday had a theme (Star Wars, Royal Wedding, etc.)
• Lots of Exposure – we put the salad cart out at as many school events as we could (Curriculum Night for parents, Staff Appreciation Luncheon, Grad/Communion/Confirmation Luncheons & the Heart & Stroke Jump Rope for Heart campaign). We also awarded the salad bar to classes as prizes for Valentine’s Day & Halloween. We did a special ribbon cutting ceremony & luncheon in celebration of receiving the Farm to Cafeteria Canada grant. We invited students, staff, school council members, Members of Parliament and local media to the event. On our first anniversary of starting the salad program, we threw ourselves a “birthday” party and invited all of the same dignitaries back to enjoy the lunch with us. The theme was “Hungry Caterpillar” and the students got to enjoy special treats, including a watermelon birthday cake (the kids even sang happy birthday to the cart!)
• We use Twitter & Instagram to advertise the salad program (@StDomSaladCart); we use this platform to announce the dates of new sessions, we also put the weekly menu out by the Monday prior so that students & parents know what’s coming up (this is helpful with younger students, parents liked being to explain what was happening each week at the carts). We also tried to make a point of tweeting/posting pics of the students & their salad creations after the Wednesday service. Again, this gave the parents an inside look at what was happening.
• Each year the salad bar also had a page in the yearbook – we used it to fill the page with pictures from throughout the year of the kids at the salad bar.
• Our students, as part of their curriculum, made posters to help promote local eating and participating in the salad program. Our grade 2 posters were all sent to Sustain Ontario and they received a special celebration for their efforts!

Ensuring student access – Having the program generate the $1 / student / week really helped and allowed for us to support students in need. We helped students on an ongoing basis and also from week to week when maybe lunch didn’t get packed or was forgotten at home. No one was ever turned away. We also had a local community partner, Halton Food for Thought, who provided additional funds to support students in need. And, every year we applied and were successful in receiving $1,000 from the Metro Green Apple Grant. This money was typically used to do free salad bars for the school.

SB: For us, the size of the program at St. Dominic was getting too big. It was getting tough to accommodate over 200 students in the 20 minute window. We thought we could either expand the program to offer it another day in the week or limit it to 200 kids. Because our school already had other lunch programs (pizza, pita, Swiss Chalet) for most of the other days, we decided to cap the enrollment at 200.

SB: I would say, take it slow & steady, maybe don’t start with a taco salad theme! Understand your limits and be okay with them. We knew when we started that we were working in a space that wasn’t a “kitchen” so we bought prewashed & chopped lettuce, and certain fruits (cantaloupe, pineapple, honeydew). We also bought cooked, ready to eat chicken and hard boiled eggs. 

Having and knowing the set number of students each week at the cart also helped us a lot. It took a lot of the guesswork out of the amounts each week and I highly suggest that schools have families pre-order for the program.

SB: Seeing the program grow and the students, staff & families embrace it was one of the most rewarding things. Knowing that you’re part of a movement that is getting fresh, local and healthy foods into the school is also at the top of the list. Sometimes we were introducing fruits & veggies (mango, edamame, beets) to students that they had never seen or tried before, it was exciting to see their appetites evolve! 

Some of our first salad participants at the schools are now in high school, and we have run into them at various events. The first thing they say to us is “we miss the salad bar”!

SB: I remember at the time that we applied for the Farm to Cafeteria Canada grant, we were excited at the prospect of teaching the students, through the salad lunch program, where their food comes from, how to eat healthy and that trying new foods can be fun. We also thought that the self-serve method at the salad bar could also teach the students independence and even a bit of confidence. They are in control of making their lunch when they’re at the salad bar, and we saw a lot of the kids thrive in that environment. The thought too was always that they’d eat the salad if they made it!