Eager children and curious parents were part of the crowd sampling and rating dozens of culinary options Thursday at Bridgeport Elementary School.
Organizing a free food festival with a schoolyard full of vendors might sound like a logistical challenge, but it’s all in a day’s work for Brittany Young of School Day Cafe, the food services agency that feeds thousands of Santa Clarita Valley K-12 students.
Young helps prepare the nonprofit to serve about 22,000 meals every day between the time students are dropped off in the morning and their afternoon pickup. The food fair provides great research, she said, as attendees were given a QR code that linked to a survey and instructions on how to rate each sample.
The contented sounds brought by satisfying samples were often followed by a food vendor reminding everyone about their number on the survey.
Young’s “meal prepping” starts early in the year in order to get meals and snacks that garner the approval of parents and students, which means the event is great research for next year.
“So, a main goal of this is to see what the kids are into, what they like the most, because this helps us shape our school menu for the schools,” said Young, who shares the titles of both chef and director of child nutrition programs.
The vendors included popular chicken nugget-seller Tyson, which shared waffle-flavored chicken and a fried spicy sausage patty, as well as national cereal brands and fast-food vendors such as Domino’s.
But Young wanted parents to know that the school menus for the breakfast cereals and fast-food vendors were a much healthier version than children might find at the drive-thru or even the grocery-store aisle, with recipes reformulated to have less fat, salt and sugar, among other things, she said.
Young said the vendors prepared to serve 1,000 at the fair, and her goal was to reach last year’s total of 500 respondents. While the organization and preparation can be challenging, seeing the school community come together is really rewarding, she added.
“I love my job and just seeing all the happy faces, and then seeing all the families that are coming to our events and testing everything that we have to offer — it makes it all worth it,” she said.
Edward Sanches, who works for School Day Cafe, has two children at Golden Oak, and said working for School Day made him much more aware of the nutrition in school meals.
“Honestly, I never thought a lot about it,” he said, “and it’s a lot healthier than you think.”
