Osseo Area Schools don’t want to upstage mom’s home cooking, but the district’s food and nutrition staff will gladly listen and repeat compliments about how their new whole grain dinner rolls compare nicely.
District dietician Tom Pellegrino and his team partnered with food scientists at Cargill last winter to revamp its dinner roll recipe with whole grains. Jessica Wellnitz and her Cargill team met the district’s goal with its white whole grain product, and in the meantime, cut fat in half and trimmed salt and sugar. That’s all well and good, but to be a success, the rolls need to agree with the taste buds of its children clientele.
Laura Lucas, nutritional manager at Brooklyn Park’s Woodland Elementary School, remembers one student at her school saying, “Wow, this tastes way better than my mom’s.” That response and others like it have been welcomed news for the food and nutrition staff, which for years had unsuccessfully sought outside help to improve its dinner roll recipe. “We were willing to pay people,” says Pellegrino, the program’s director and a registered dietician with the district for 21 years. “We were going to local vocational schools, culinary schools, and we couldn’t get callbacks.”
Through another connection last fall, the school district reached out to the agri-business conglomerate based in Minnetonka. For Cargill, this is a unique, first-time partnership with a local school district, and it hopes it’s the first of many, Wellnitz says. “We felt really good about helping the school, and we’ve now developed a really good relationship with them,” says Wellnitz, a senior food technologist at Cargill for 11 years. “Hopefully, we can help them with other things in the future.”
Osseo Area Schools has since gone back to Cargill for help with its French bread recipe, and they are working on formulating changes. “We felt that we could utilize our expertise and our resources at Cargill to provide information that they otherwise may not be able to obtain,” Wellnitz says.
During the introductory meeting, Wellnitz asked Pellegrino what he wanted to accomplish and suggested that the district use frozen dough. “He was very adamant that they believe in what they are doing with scratch baking,” Wellnitz says. “They believe that it’s unique, and they want to continue to do that and provide fresh baked products for their students.”
Pellegrino and Lucas say Osseo Area Schools is a rare school district that bakes bread at each school. “That is something most school districts haven’t done for a long time,” Pellegrino says. “We’ve held onto that.”
Lucas says the district aims to set an example for other schools to follow. “I feel that we are providing a service that has gone by the wayside with all the fast food, and that type of thing, that the children are introduced to at a young age,” Lucas says.
Although they are improving the food’s nutritional content, it wouldn’t matter if the students didn’t like the taste and didn’t eat it. But that hasn’t been the case, Pellegrino says. “The acceptance is extremely high,” says Pellegrino of all schools offering the white whole grain rolls.
“They’ve seen that the smell of the fresh baked goods is really important for the students and attracts them to these products,” Wellnitz says. “I think that’s fantastic, and its working. … If doing that helps the students eat more nutritious foods, then I think it’s the best thing for them to do.”
