GREENE: North Greene approves new food management company
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By Carmen Ensinger
North Greene School Board members unanimously approved Arbor Management, Inc. to provide the district’s food service for the coming school year at the May 17 school board meeting.
Last year, the district decided to outsource the school breakfast and lunch program. Organic Life had the low bid and to say that the district was less than happy with their performance would be putting it mildly.
The district only had a one year contract with Organic Life and decided to send out a request for proposals from other food management companies. Arbor Management was the only company who submitted a bid.
Two representatives from Arbor Management were present at the meeting to answer any questions board members might have before the vote was taken. They were Kathy Tentler, Vice President of Operations and Jeff Krause, Vice President of Sales.
“We feel that we would be a great partner for us to expand the food service horizons that you guys currently have,” Krause said. “Our expectation is to take the program to another level.”
The contract with Organic Life ends on June 30 and the contract with Arbor Management begins on July 1. Tentler went over the process of transitioning with the employees.
“What we will be doing is setting up times to talk to all the employees and introduce ourselves,” Tentler said. “Our goal is to hire all the employees back that are currently here. It is important to keep everyone employed and make sure that they feel comfortable with the company that they work for.”
One employee who won’t be back, however, is the food service director.
“We will be recruiting for a food service director that will be brought in who will work for Arbor,” Tentler said. “We think it is important to make sure that you (school board) are part of that process so that you can buy into who we recommend bringing into your building to represent Arbor.”
Tentler said they would do the interviews and when they get to a point where they have one or two good candidates, then they would involve the district.
“Once we have narrowed it down, then we would have the district or the principals or whoever wants to be involved meet the candidates,” she said. “That way we are not just bringing someone in here and you are kinda stuck with them. We don’t want that situation to happen.”
There will also be a district manager that would oversee the program.
“We currently have the Alton School District and we are trying to get some others and we would then have whoever the district manager would be overseeing that team,” Tentler said. “The district manager will pop in in the beginning and make sure things are going right.”
Tentler said she is very involved with her team.
“I have a team of district managers and we have meetings regularly,” she said. “We talk about things in each district and what is going on and what we need to do so we are ahead of the game. If there is something on the menu that is not working, we don’t want to keep it on. We like to make sure that we are not just doing standard operating procedures. We want to make sure it is more personalized and we want to elevate your menu.”
As for what is on the menu, Tentler said they will seek advice from a variety of sources.
“We usually like to have a student advisory board and will send out parent surveys once we have an opportunity to introduce our full site menu to see what is working and what is not,” she said. “We have contests and sometimes the students kind of vote on what they would like to see on the menu and we make it special. We want the students to be taking ownership of what they want to see on the menu.”
One of the board members asked them what school districts they were in.
“The majority of our school districts are in the Chicago metropolitan area and the suburbs,” Krause said. “However, we are in central and western Illinois and in Wisconsin as well. We started at Alton last year taking over for a company that had been there for 30 years. Our goal is to grow this St. Louis market and we feel that North Greene is a key part of that.”
In addition to the Alton School District, they are also in Canton, Midwest Central, Morton, Urbana, Rochelle, Mendota, Sandwich and Illinois Valley Community College. All in all, they serve 55 school districts in the state.
Board member Rachelle Malin asked how many food options the students would have. Tentler said it could be as many as they wanted.
“You don’t want to have too many options at the lower grade levels because sometimes the kids could take too long to make up their mind if there are too many choices,” Tentler said. “Typically, we would do a hot entre and maybe up to four options at the grade school. The high school is a different program and we have many options there.”
Board member Casey Nell brought up something that the district had to deal with this year in that the later lunch periods sometimes only had one option left.
“Our goal is to never have that happen,” Tentler said. “Obviously, there might be a time where it may happen, but we are going to get on that as soon as we know about it.”
Krause said for one thing there should be batch cooking throughout the morning.
“If you have four lunch periods, they should have been cooking for the first two and then cooking again for the last two,” he said. “You should never just cook it all in the morning and have it sitting in a warmer for forever to where it loses its quality.”
Arbor’s bid was in the amount of $797,052.39, almost $100,000 more than Organic Life’s bid last year. However, this includes all of the salaries and benefits of the cooks.
