Sacramento City Unified School District serves more than 40,000 K-12 students across 83 public schools, all of whom are entitled to free breakfast and lunch under California’s Universal Meals Program, a first-of-its-kind initiative that provides no-cost meals to all students regardless of family income.

What makes Sacramento remarkable, however, isn’t just the cost of student meals. There are staples like pizza and chicken nuggets, to be sure. But kids also have hearty breakfast choices like whole-grain blueberry pancakes, biscuits and sausage gravy, and egg bites, and sophisticated lunch options like honey chipotle chicken, yellow curry with baked tofu, and beef Bolognese pasta.

Many of those meals are made entirely from scratch at the district’s Central Kitchen, a 50,000-square-foot, taxpayer-funded facility where professional chefs prepare fresh meals using seasonal ingredients sourced from nearby farms.

Established in 2022, Central Kitchen makes meals with a mission, says Director of Nutrition Services Kelsey Nederveld.

“We in school nutrition have inherited some really bad problems, and one of those problems is ultra-processed foods,” she says. “Just because we inherited something, however, doesn’t mean we have to continue down the same path.” Read more…