FARMINGTON — Andrew Hutchins, Director of Food Services at Regional School Unit 9, reported significant success to the RSU 9 school board in his administration report on Tuesday, Mar. 28.
In his report, Hutchins estimates a total of 1.7 million in revenue for the school year of 2022-2023, which he accredits to diligent teamwork in reducing food waste, controlling inventories and staff efficiency.
The revenue is 102% increase compared to their revenue from five years ago ($872,572), and Hutchins also reports that despite increased food cost, his staff managed to keep their cost at 31%, while also keeping labor cost below 40%
“That’s incredible,” Director Alexander Creznic of Farmington stated. “With the rising food costs and inflation, everything that everyone else is dealing with right now, I want to commend you on running a tight ship and doing what you’ve been able to do.”
“I’m very fortunate,” Hutchins said. “My staff and I had a big meeting, as we do before school starts, and we knew food inflation was going to be a challenge this year. They really buckled down and paid extra close attention to any food waste.”
“It’s made a huge difference,” he added.
Increased food costs and a large increase in student body consumption were previously report to the school board in November of last year. In this previous report, Hutchins expressed concern over rising food cost.
“I’ve been doing this for over 30 years now,” Hutchins at this November meeting. “And I’ve never seen a case of romaine lettuce cost $126. It used to be on average $40 to $50 on it in this time of year.”
Despite these setbacks, Hutchins has been able to turn enough profit that he has been able to use the school nutrition budget to pay for large tickets items, such as ovens and dishwashers, as opposed to using money from the facilities line of the school budget.
“Last couple of years we’ve been able to do that with school funds from the school nutrition department and not the budget,” he said. “So that’s a very good thing for the district that we’ve been able to purchase that equipment.”
According to Hutchins, there were even talks of starting a fund to replace equipment that was old and malfunctioning four years ago, but with the success of the program they have managed to avoid the need for that fund.
With the high revenue, Hutchins is looking to invest back into the program, with planned investments including:
- A new walk-in cooler and freezer at Academy Hill School
- New tables, cooking and serving equipment and updating the look of Cascade Brook School’s cafeteria
- More local food
- A Clean Label Initiative (moving away from canned, frozen, or processed food, favoring fresh fruits and vegetables and scratch cooking.)
- School Nutrition Staff
- More equipment replacement over the next two years
Hutchins also shared with the board that he and his staff managed to find uses for milk that was in danger of going bad before it could be consumed due to school cancellation.
“Let me just explain to you real quick what happens when a superintendent calls a snow day right before vacation,” he explained.
“I’m sitting on 2000 cartons of milk,” he continued. “So, we are starting to scramble and figure out what to do with this. Whatever we can’t sell is we do donate to food pantries and things like that, but we tossed all of our chocolate milk, fat free chocolate milk into the freezer and said ‘Well we’re gonna come up with a plan for that.’”
The milk was used for hot cocoa bars for the elementary schools for January and February, which according to Hutchins was a big hit for both the kids and the teachers.
“It was a win for us because we didn’t have to lose anything, but it was just as huge a win for the kids and [it got their] spirits up,” he said.
Comments are not available on this story.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
