Duda, The Produce Mom offer culinary training for schools
Oviedo, Fla.-based Duda Farm Fresh Foods is working with The Produce Mom to educate students about fruits and vegetables.
The company’s culinary ambassador chef, Todd Fisher, led hands-on culinary training sessions with Lori Taylor, CEO of The Produce Mom, to nearly 100 school foodservice professionals in Indiana. The live training focused on strategies to make fresh produce more exciting and inviting to students, with an emphasis on the national Smarter Lunchrooms Movement.
The training sessions included demonstration and sampling of five dishes from Fisher’s U.S. Department of Agriculture school meal recipe collection to promote the under-consumed vegetable subcategories: dark green, red/orange and legume, the company said in a news release.
All participants in the training received culinary skills training and Smarter Lunchrooms Strategies continuing education credit, authorized by the U.S. Department of Education and USDA Team Nutrition program.
“When my business received the opportunity to create a USDA Team Nutrition curriculum for school foodservice personnel focused on promoting vegetables, I felt strongly that the leaders of the produce industry — like Duda Farm Fresh Foods — needed to be involved,” Produce Mom’s Taylor said in the news release. “In one week, the live training sessions starring Chef Todd Fisher have impacted over 10 million annual school meals. The current audience of the forthcoming digital curriculum represents over 1 billion annual school meals across the United States.”
The training program resulted in one of the most comprehensive recipe collections of USDA-approved school meals, along with digital and video training materials that will be shared with schools across the country well beyond the 2020 program end date, according to the release.
The USDA Team Nutrition program also offers results data on fresh produce consumption among school-aged children, offering the fresh produce industry tools to support new product development, foodservice innovation and sales and marketing, according to the release.
“We fundamentally believe within Duda Farm Fresh Foods that improved nutrition through healthier alternatives and choices in consuming more fresh fruits and vegetables for our society is important,” Dan Duda, president of Duda Farm Fresh Foods, said in the release. “We invest in programs and services that support school meal programs because we believe it will create a lasting impact on future generations and our industry as a whole.”
