Mojo pork shoulder with black bean salad and caramelized plantains butter rooster with eco-friendly lentil salad and a mango lassi and roasted chicken with handmade biscuits, corn salad and watermelon. All those are some of the lunch items that a group of cafe chefs are producing for DPS college students as they head back to school.

So, mom and dad, you could want to imagine twice just before packing that PB&J with baby carrots.

Starting up this yr, Dan Giusti and his 12 Brigaid chefs are performing throughout the Denver faculty district, serving to cafeteria employees to make lunches that children want to eat. The chefs will be teaching employees on every little thing from knife skills to food storage. They’ll be organizing kitchens, making procedures extra productive and, of program, putting food onto plates — at scale, at charge and meeting all regulatory well being recommendations along the way.

“This is a true partnership and collaboration,” explained Giusti, a previous chef at Noma in Copenhagen (you might have read of it as the world’s very best cafe) who started Brigaid on his return to the United States.

“We are not jogging the school’s (cafeterias),” he additional. “They have an infrastructure, a hierarchy … and we have created generally a instruction system over the class of a few decades that goes in conjunction with (DPS) foods service’s five-calendar year strategic program.”

Although the district has been making cafeteria foods from scratch for more than a decade, its recent goal is to make improvements to the high quality and regularity of that food throughout much more than 150 universities, mentioned Theresa Peña with DPS Foods & Nutrition Providers.

In order to make lasting alter, every single of the 12 Brigaid chefs will be paired with a supervisor who oversees a grouping of colleges. Alongside one another they’ll carry out a instruction software that will loop in kitchen area managers and cafeteria employees. The curriculum covers food security and managing, kitchen area business and management, and finally, recipe growth.

With the help of three substantial grants, the district brought on Brigaid for a three-calendar year agreement that quantities to $3.7 million, Peña claimed. By the close of the plan, their goal is to have a lot more learners eating university lunches, and a cafeteria team armed with the skillset to make reliable meals, like at a huge restaurant franchise.

“So quite a few college students and people have no notion about the top quality of the food that we’re serving,” Peña said. “They nonetheless have this misperception that it’s, you know, secret meat. What we have to have to do then is just up our activity in phrases of culinary skillset of staff and also recipes. If we can exhibit proof of this in a huge urban faculty district … that just produces this kind of a considerable possibility not just for Denver kids but also for general public faculty children all throughout the region.”

Peña and her crew have been in talks with Giusti and Brigaid considering that right before the pandemic. Main up to this to start with yr, they’ve toured each individual college kitchen area, interviewed cafeteria and administrative workers, and “counted every thing down to the past spoon in each kitchen area to do an stock, to recognize exactly where they’re at,” Giusti stated.