School Cafeteria Program Earns A+ From Eaters, Government Graders

Some people, mostly people who ate at school, say good cafeteria food is a contradiction in terms, like military music or jumbo shrimp. Not Rick De Burgh, director of food services for the Glendale Unified School District.

“I’m very pleased with the meals we serve,” said De Burgh, 44, whose cafeteria program is rated A+ by both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the California Department of Education. Nonetheless, De Burgh is realistic about school food. He is the first to admit: “I never worked at Perino’s.”

Indeed, De Burgh has had what cynics might describe as the perfect background for overseeing cafeteria cuisine. Earlier in his career, he worked in Army mess halls and airline flight kitchens. He also supervised food service for the USC Olympic Village during the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

De Burgh runs Glendale’s biggest fast-food operation. Every school day, he serves 3,000 breakfasts and nearly 11,000 lunches to students who have less than an hour to order and eat. He must meet strict nutritional guidelines, which are often “written in government,” he noted. And he must make enough money in the process to keep his operation afloat.

Sales Are Up

As evidence of the success of the program, De Burgh points to the fact that more Glendale students are buying food at school. Last year, the program brought in slightly more than $3 million. This year, cafeteria sales are up 18%, although the student body has increased only 10%, to about 23,000.

Sales are rising despite the fact that high school students may leave campus at lunchtime and eat at home or at nearby restaurants. De Burgh is especially pleased when he sees a student buy school food, then head off-campus with it. Occasionally, he says proudly, he gets calls from local eatery owners who complain, “Your students are bringing your lunches in here and using my ketchup!”

It was while working for American Airlines that “I learned that the nine most important words in our business are: Satisfy the customer, satisfy the customer, satisfy the customer,” De Burgh said.

At least once a year, De Burgh meets with the student councils of the district’s three senior highs and four junior high schools to learn what the students would like to see on the menu. He also visits at least one elementary school class to find out what the younger students hunger for.

No Steak and Lobster

“If a kid likes steak and lobster, he’s not going to get it on the school lunch menu because it’s not cost-effective,” De Burgh said. “Fortunately, kids like cheap things.” Specifically, he has found, they like hamburgers, hot dogs and pizza.

If students request a particular food, De Burgh tries to field-test it at their school. His experience tells him that today’s students won’t eat the mystery-meat casseroles that were the cafeteria staples of yesteryear. But the students don’t always know that. One student council requested macaroni and cheese. De Burgh shook his head but served it anyway. He sold two portions. Turkey with gravy and mashed potatoes also proved unpopular. A fish patty with cheese was another culinary bomb.

Mexican food is universally popular in the Glendale schools. Students don’t think of it as ethnic food any more than they think of pizza as ethnic food, De Burgh said. Ten-year-old Rubie Tarverdian is from Armenia, but when the fourth-grader at Mark Keppel Elementary School was asked which cafeteria foods he likes best, he answered, “My favorite is burritos and tacos!”

De Burgh said the cafeteria is a melting pot for most youngsters. “I get a kid in from Southeast Asia who has never seen cheese before in his life and, within a month, he likes pizza because his friends like pizza and it’s cool to like pizza.”

Pita Experiment

Ironically, De Burgh experimented with a spiced-beef-in-a-pita sandwich, thinking that it would appeal to the district’s growing number of Armenian students. “It didn’t fly,” he recalled. “The Armenian students didn’t think it was authentic, and the others didn’t know what it was.”

In March, De Burgh plans to bring an elementary school class into the test kitchen for a nutrition lesson and to develop a month of menus for their peers.

De Burgh is outfitting a test kitchen next to his office in La Crescenta where he will develop and test new recipes and where he will be able to sample and analyze new products offered to him by commercial vendors. As he explains, American schools, like American mothers, are doing less and less of their own cooking. He buys about 75% of his foods already prepared.

Sometimes the cafeteria chief is confident that a new food will succeed long before the students taste it. Such was the case with chicken nuggets, which was accepted immediately. “Am I a genius?” he asked of his decision to add the item to his menus. “No. McDonald’s had just spent millions of dollars telling the kids, ‘You will like chicken nuggets.’ ” There are times, De Burgh said, when “I do my market research by driving down the street and seeing which fast-food outlets are still open.”

Principals Too

Although students are De Burgh’s most visible customers, they are not his only ones, he says. So are principals and school district officials, who expect him to deliver decent meals quickly and on a strict budget. Out of concern for these other customers, he said, “I don’t serve popcorn to elementary students anymore because popcorn creates a mess on the school campus.”

De Burgh, who moved to Glendale three years ago from the Los Angeles Unified School District, has computerized his records so that he has instant access to accurate information about his inventory and costs. But his program is not uniformly high-tech. One of the first things he did in Glendale was to stop the practice of shipping hot foods to individual schools.

“Any housewife in America knows you can’t keep hot food hot and retain quality,” he said. Instead, foods are kept cold or even frozen until they can be heated at the site--in conventional ovens, not microwaves. “The microwave is not faster for high volume,” he said.

In 1987, De Burgh’s was one of nine California cafeteria programs cited for excellence by the state and federal governments. As Albert Tweltridge, administrator of child nutrition programs for the California Department of Education, explained, about 25% of the state’s 1,800 school lunch programs are evaluated each year. The very best are singled out for recognition.

Strengths of the Glendale program include its innovativeness and the large number of students who participate, Tweltridge said. “The staff felt it was a model national school lunch program,” he said.

Praise From Peers

De Burgh’s peers also praise his program. Randy Altenberg, deputy director of food services for the Los Angeles school district, said De Burgh has been particularly successful in developing a program that appeals to secondary students, who are not the captive audience for school lunch programs that younger children are.

“He is an extremely good merchandiser and marketer,” Altenberg said. “He has been more attentive than most to changes in the marketplace, and he’s been able to keep many secondary students in the program.”

De Burgh said he is constantly trying to think of ways to improve food service in the district. Instead of taking a tray already full of food, the younger students now choose the specific items they want as they pass down the cafeteria line. This approach, known in the school lunch trade as “offer versus serve,” has dramatically reduced waste, the food director said. He has also started offering older students a “value-added lunch”: a bigger burrito or a submarine sandwich with extra meat for $1.25, a quarter more than the standard lunch.

And to shorten the lines at the service windows, the district bought several carts like the ones that hot-dog vendors use. Each cart provides a stylish alternative to two cafeteria lines.

Sometimes circumstances force De Burgh to be creative. Recently, he came up with an idea for using government-subsidized honey and peanuts that he had on hand. A consultant is developing a recipe for honey-roasted peanuts that will be sold as snacks. And he found a way to serve French toast for breakfast despite the “spork.”

Spork Doesn’t Cut It

A plastic implement that is part fork, part spoon, the spork is “the ubiquitous school food-service eating instrument,” he said. It has its virtues, but cutting isn’t one of them. In deference to the spork, De Burgh serves French toast sticks instead of the more familiar, full-sized French toast.

It is the fate of the successful cafeteria captain to be without honor in his own land. On a recent visit to Herbert Hoover High School with De Burgh, no one referred to the school lunch as “nuclear waste,” as campus food has been described by youngsters elsewhere. But no one was rapturous over it, either.

Sandra Guerrero, a 15-year-old sophomore, said her school-issue hamburger was “gross.” The bun was so soggy, she said, “I have to eat the hamburger with my fingers.” She and her buddies prefer to dine at a nearby taco truck, but, on this occasion, they just didn’t have enough money.

While her sandwich rated no stars, Guerrero loved the raw carrot slices that were served with it. “This is delicious,” she said as she dipped a carrot into a little paper cup of ranch-style dressing. Sandra doesn’t know it, but De Burgh is proud of the fact that he found ranch dressing made without monosodium glutamate.

De Burgh smiled in spite of Sandra’s mixed review of lunch. He had just tricked another student into eating a vegetable. “You know, you can increase the consumption of raw carrots and celery by 40% if you serve them with a dip,” he said.