Schools

Making School Lunches at Northwest Requires a Lot of Wheat Bread and Texas Toast

Bread, milk and meat are needed in large quantities to feed the Northwest School District's hungry students.

A school system doesn't exist just to feed a student's brain; their stomachs have to be filled as well.

And it takes a lot of supplies to satisfy the appetites of the students in the Northwest School District, which has about 6,600 students. there are  22,292 packages of hamburger buns and 900 loaves of Texas toast, just to scratch the surface.

The Northwest Board of Education approved bids Thursday for the food supplies  that will be needed in lunchrooms across the district in the 2012-13 school year the usage amounts for the 2011-12 school year were year were used in the bid specifications for those companies that were vying to supply the district with bread, dairy products and general groceries for the coming school year.

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The amount of food products required to feed Northwest's students for the year can be daunting

Take wheat bread, for example. As part of a move toward providing more healthy offerings in school cafeterias. there were 5,566 loaves of wheat bread consumed in the Northwest School District cafeterias during the 201-12 school year. That is in addition to the 22,292 packages of hamburger buns and 772 packages of hot dog buns. Also in 2011-12, students and staff consumed 1,092 packages of deli buns and 900 loaves of Texas Toast. The district spent a total of about $33,921 to purchase bread items during the last school year.

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Dairy products are another staple required in the school cafeteria's offerings. in the 2011-12 school year, the Northwest School District students consumed 500,931 half-pints of skim chocolate milk, 138,552 half-pints of low fat white milk, 8,674 half-pints of skim white milk and 16,062 half-pints of fruit juice.

Th cafeterias also used 3,775 pounds of low fat cottage cheese, 312 pounds of cream cheese, 2,450 pounds of sour cream, and sold 1,178, 24-packs of three-ounce ice cream cups.

The cost to Northwest to provide the dairy items in 2011-12 was about $267,048.

The numbers were equally high in the grocery and frozen food portion of the district's food supply list for 2011-12, including 195 cases of ground beef, 334 cases of ground beef patties, 358 cases of biscuits, 624 cases of bread sticks, 489 cases of popcorn chicken. 115 cases of fish nuggets, 782 cases of apple juice, 26 cases of ground pork, 211 cases of fruit cocktail, 1,417 cases of chicken tenders, 71 cases on cinnamon toast cereal, 177 cases of yogurt, 390 cases of ketchup, 50 cases of zero trans fat oil, 11 cases of pickles and 22 cases of shredded cheese.

All of the provisions for a year's worth of student lunches and breakfasts are handled by about 63 people in the food services department of the Northwest School District, according to Superintendent Paul Ziegler. He said about 55 of those employees are on the front line of cooking and serving the meals.

"Give or take a few, we probably serve one million meals a year," Ziegler said. "In fact, we probably serve more meals a day than all of the fast food restaurants in the entire district."


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