HUNTINGTON BEACH : School Aides Get Taste of Technology

Surrounded by a feast of nachos, sandwiches, chocolate chip cookies and other munchies, Westminster School District officials Tuesday toured the district’s recently renovated state-of-the-art kitchen.

The $1-million central kitchen at Helen Stacey Intermediate School, crammed with gleaming stainless steel cooking and refrigeration machines, is designed to replace four other kitchens districtwide. The goal of the consolidation is to provide more healthful and varied foods to students more efficiently, said Amy Beckstrom, food production manager.

“This will enable us to make more foods in bulk. Before, the other kitchens didn’t have the time to make a lot of foods,” she said.

The new kitchen will make it easier for the district to offer fresh-baked bread, fruits and steamed vegetables to students at all 18 schools. Children’s diets will include far less fat than previously, Beckstrom said.

The meals are packed in special containers that keep food fresh, then taken to other schools, Beckstrom said.

Built last summer, the kitchen now produces about 75% of the district’s 10,000 hot meals each day. The kitchen has been operating for about two months and will eventually produce all the district’s meals.

Beckstrom also showed off the kitchen’s refrigerators, which are designed to chill food in minutes to improve nutrition and greatly limit the spread of bacteria.

The Champion Cookie Depositor, which can mold 14,000 cookies in an hour, was the most popular piece of equipment on the tour. Visitors munched on cookies fresh from the oven while the machine’s metal arms pulled dough from a container and dumped neat dollops of the stuff onto cooking pans.

“They’re great. They are fantastic!” exclaimed Grace Epperson after sampling one of the chocolate chip cookies.

Epperson, an instructional aide at Ray M. Schmitt Elementary School, surveyed the wide range of foods displayed throughout the kitchen and said that if she were a student, “I’d be thinking, ‘When is the next meal?’ ”

Students were less enthusiastic about the quality of school meals, but said they have noticed improvement since the new kitchen opened.

“The pizza used to be really greasy and sick to eat,” said 11-year-old Misty McCormick. “Now it’s like you ordered from Domino’s.”