Education Week - March 5, 2014 - Leaders to Learn From - S9

STUDENT NUTRITION
Bertrand Weber
DIRECTOR, CULINARY AND NUTRITION SERVICES
Minneapolis Public Schools
BY LESLI A. MAXWELL
ertrand Weber had devoted his professional
life-in boutique hotels and
high-end restaurants-to pleasing the most
discerning of palates.
But the breaded chicken nuggets and
canned fruit swimming in syrup he saw on
his son's lunch tray pushed the longtime hotel
and restaurant manager to swap a career in
stylish hospitality for the decidedly less posh
world of school cafeterias.
He was determined to transform what K-12
students in Minnesota eat at school.
"We were pumping our kids with processed
B
food," said Mr. Weber. "I became an angry parent."

Now, more than a decade later, Mr. Weber is
the director of culinary and nutrition services
for the 36,000-student Minneapolis district,
where he is overseeing a massive shift in
what students in that city encounter in their
cafeterias.
He is steadily phasing out prepackaged
meals assembled in a central kitchen and
trucked to school lunchrooms and replacing
them with meals made from scratch and featuring
fresh fruit, vegetables, and meats and
other ingredients that are locally sourced.
Butternut-squash turkey chili, heirloomtomato
salsas, and fresh salad bars are becoming
fixtures in Minneapolis' school lunchrooms.

What makes the ongoing transformation
in Minneapolis remarkable is that Mr. Weber
has done it with a food-service budget considerably
smaller than those of similarly sized
districts. When he came on board in January
2012, Minneapolis' food budget was $15.6
million, compared with $23 million across
the Mississippi River in the neighboring, and
slightly bigger, St. Paul school district.
And he's doing it in a district where most of
the 62 schools do not have fully functioning
kitchens.
"It's a really smart tactic he's using to raise
the image of his program so that participation
rates go up and [he can] raise more revenue
to do all the things he wants to do," said Jean
Ronnei, the chief of operations for the St. Paul
district and the vice president of the School
Nutrition Association. "For 30 years, if you
talked about school food in Minneapolis, you
were talking about airline-type food. He is
completely changing that, and with it, completely
changing people's minds about what
food is in that school system."
Personal Mission
Born in Switzerland, Mr. Weber, 57, brings a
missionary's zeal to the job of school food. And
for very personal reasons.
His son, at age 7, was diagnosed with Type 1
diabetes, requiring daily doses of insulin and
close monitoring of his food intake.
"I went to lunch with him every day in that
first year after his diagnosis," Mr. Weber said.
"The last things he needed were exactly the
things being served in the cafeteria every day:
highly refined carbohydrates and canned,
syrupy fruit. I complained endlessly about the
food."
A short time later, his son's district-Hop-
kins, in surburban Minneapolis-launched
a search for a new food-services director who
had a hospitality background like Mr. Weber's.
"My family said to me that if I didn't apply
for the job, I could never complain about
school food again," he said. "They were right."
He landed the job. Mr. Weber led the foodservices
program for three years in the
7,400-student Hopkins district, where he
was able to introduce more fresh produce,
purchase local food products, and involve students
and the community in the planning of
menus. He pushed hard to eliminate trans
fats in Hopkins, years ahead of the recent federal
mandate to so do.
From there, he left for a job overseeing nutrition
and culinary standards for a privately
owned food-management company that
helped more than 180 districts across Minnesota
and other Midwestern states bring fresh
fruit and vegetable bars to school lunchrooms.
He also got involved in the growing movement
LEADERS TO LEARN FROM > leaders.edweek.org
EDUCATION WEEK * March 5, 2014
| S9
Jenn Ackerman for Education Week
http://leaders.edweek.org
Education Week - March 5, 2014 - Leaders to Learn From

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