To retain his employees and keep them happy in their jobs, Richie Wilim knows the most important thing he can do is train them and give them skills.
Wilim is the director of child nutrition services at Redwood City Elementary School District in California. Just before he took this position, 18 months ago, he was the assistant director and chef at Vacaville Unified School District in the same state.
There, he instituted Lunch Thyme University, a year-long programme for ten staff members. His plan is to introduce the same programme at Redwood City.
He created the course because he realised school staff perform similar tasks and require similar skills to restaurant employees, but don’t receive the same training.
“I saw it as a missing component in schools”, he says. “There is zero prerequisite to be able to cook in schools. That is such a huge miss and staff don’t have any of the tools to do what they need to do. This programme brings in some positive psychology and the feeling that they’re doing something important.”
The key elements of the programme are: learning how to operate a school nutrition programme; knife skills; basic from-scratch cooking skills such as making a roux sauce; how to taste food and make adjustments; how to use equipment and new technology; and butchery.
Every three months staff in the programme take a test which includes creating a new recipe from scratch. The course ends with a final exam in which they develop, price, and cook a dish approved for a school dinner.
Of the staff Wilim inherited in his new job, some had some cooking skills but others didn’t even know how to cook rice, he says, “so there was a huge need for training”.
He started off by inviting staff to cook what they wanted and he cooked alongside them, then taught them how to scale the recipes.
“We’ve barely scratched the surface on that at Redwood City School District”, he says. “At Vacaville that was a great way to bond with the team. Working together was collaborative.”
To take advantage of downtimes, Wilim is trying to use holidays, when the children aren’t at school, to do deep dives into teaching the staff cooking techniques. So far he’s been concentrating on the dishes the catering department serves to the kids.
Now at Redwood City, Wilim plans to launch this training programme but he’s having to start off slowly. He was brought in to his new role to switch the entire catering programme from one run by a contract company to a self-operated one. This happened because parents from the school wanted from-scratch foods, cooked on-site, that offered more nutrition versus the packaged, processed foods the children were fed previously.
A simple, but large part of this is making the food sound better, he says. He’s been using a graphic design platform to create colourful and attractive menus and is adding more descriptions, to sound more like a restaurant. For example, ‘slow braised beef cavatappi [a type of pasta]’ instead of ‘baked cavatappi’ and ‘ham and cheese sandwich on baguette’ rather than ‘ham sandwich’.
Wilim jumped in to his new role with two feet. Switching over to being self-operated meant an extraordinary amount of work. He had to find new vendors for everything on the menu, write new menus, find local farmers who could supply enough seasonal produce, and even purchase new kitchen equipment because some of the existing kit was domestic specification.
“We invested in equipment to cook the food better and use technology to cook overnight for things such as chicken stock”, says Wilim, who adds that sometimes, previously, the staff brought in their own equipment, such as spatulas and pans, from home. Since he came on board the kitchen had had a $1 million (£760,000) overhaul, with funding coming from the California Department of Education.
Creating healthy and hearty dishes for the children instead of simply putting food wrapped in plastic on trays has resonated really well with the catering staff, Wilim says. “The team has more ownership; they’re eating the food themselves; before they never touched the food they served to the kids. It has to be soul-less if they’re serving up the packaged stuff. Now the morale is better and they’re so much more savvy.”
The financial result of the changes hasn’t been too shabby either. The catering department at Redwood City saw a 10% increase in revenue in the first full year of being self-operated, which was around $800,000 (£607,000).
At this point, the menu is halfway to where Wilim would like it to be and he hopes the full transition to happen in 2026.
“The low-hanging fruit was getting rid of the canned fruit and vegetables and instead working with local farms. Once we started getting in satsumas in the winter and local apples in the fall it was fun to see that immediate change”, he says, which led to more kids eating lunch. He also changed his bakery provider to work with a local company that uses no additives.”
He then addressed the main courses, and the reason wasn’t just logistics. “It’s important,” he says, “when making changes to menus, to get both pupil and parent buy-in. Every month the parents are emailed a list of the main courses so those items are more visible and carry more weight.”
Next he plans to overhaul the salad bars, introducing more local and seasonal produce, as well as whole grain salads.
Having the parents be so invested in the change has been both helpful and stressful for Wilim. “They were relentless because they expected immediate change”, he says, not realising it would take a year or two to get the programme to where they wanted it to be. However, on the plus side, he explains, ‘it was awesome because it gave me a guideline for what they wanted to see’.