Jeffrey Boyce
I’m Jeffrey Boyce and it is January 24, 2022. I’m here in Mississippi today and I’m speaking with Lonnie Burt. Welcome Lonnie and thanks for taking the time to talk with me today.
Lonnie Burt
Happy to be here.
Jeffrey Boyce
How’s the weather there.
Lonnie Burt
Actually today it’s warm. It’s about 28 degrees. We’ve had a pretty cold spell where it’s been about five degrees and with the wind chill factor it’s been below zero, so 28 feels balmy.
Jeffrey Boyce
I don’t feel so bad then. It was 14 here a day or two ago but it’s in the 50s today with sunshine.
Tell me your job position and how long you’ve been doing it.
Lonnie Burt
Well, my position here in Hartford, and I’m in Hartford Public Schools, I’m the senior director of the food and child nutrition services, so I run the food service program here.
And I’ve been here in Hartford since 2004. I’ve been in child nutrition since 1985, and prior to this district I was in Manchester Public Schools, which is across the river from me. I was there for 15 years and prior to that I was a director in a small district down in the Fairfield area, in Trumbull. And so I’ve been a director since 1987 and I’ve been a child nutrition since 1985 so you can kind of do the math and see that I’m not young.
Jeffrey Boyce
Well, I bet we have a mutual friend that we lost recently, Frank Harris.
Lonnie Burt
Frank Harris. I most certainly did. It’s funny you say that because when you asked me to do this, I did go on [the website and saw] Frank Harris, I have a great picture of him and I together. When I was in Trumbull he was in Norwalk, literally two districts away from me, so I’ve known him since then – wonderful man, wonderful.
Jeffrey Boyce
Wasn’t he wonderful? I loved Frank.
Lonnie Burt
He was a sweetheart.
Jeffrey Boyce
He was, and his wife was a sweetheart too.
Lonnie Burt
Absolutely. They met there in school lunch.
Jeffrey Boyce
Exactly, and how he tells the story, he said she stuck her head out the window and said, “Look at that poor guy going through his first interview.”
It’s a funny story. I loved interviewing them. We spent the day doing it. We interviewed for an hour or two and then she made us lunch, and then we interviewed most of the rest of the afternoon, and then they insisted on taking me out to dinner before I went back to my hotel.
Lonnie Burt
That’s so sweet, yeah. Good solid people.
Jeffrey Boyce
That really were. Well, let’s get rolling. Today we’re here to talk about the
Covid pandemic. Can you talk to me about some of your experiences, how you’ve had to deal with them?
Lonnie Burt
I can, and I can say to you without any doubt, that this is probably the hardest I’ve ever worked or the hardest this industry has ever been in all the years and all the changes that I’ve seen, this has been by far incredibly overwhelming.
Jeffrey Boyce
That’s saying a lot.
Lonnie Burt
Yeah, this has been – it is not for the faint of heart, and it really, in my experience, whether that be with school food service people or the administration or anybody, it separated out the men from the boys. It didn’t build character, it revealed character. You really started to see people’s skill sets.
But from the very beginning, we just didn’t know what was going on. So I think back to March 2020 and how scared we were.
You know, it was a pandemic and you didn’t know what to do and everyone’s ‘wear masks, don’t wear masks’ and things were changing so rapidly, and every school district closed and you were here, and you just didn’t know what. It was fearful. And I said to somebody back then, it was like when you had to retool. So when they asked GM to stop making cars and use that machinery to learn how to make a respirator. I felt like it was the same thing for us. We are a service industry. We know how to prepare food, and we know how to serve food, hot food, see your smiling face, here you go honey, and clean up and go home at the end of the day. But to figure out how we were now going to package food and get it for you to bring home, A, it was really – when you are a service industry, we felt like we weren’t giving service. We were just throwing food at people and yet at the same time, our families were incredibly grateful, and so we really had to really redo. I mean we’ve never distributed the frozen food and that’s what we did.
Things were changing almost by the minute and hourly in the very beginning, and in my district, I knew I had to put a plan of getting meals to kids for that following week, before we had all of the waivers in place from USDA that said we could serve at a school. So that very first week we actually did hot meals out of remote locations, out of a Boys and Girls Club, in front of them, literally in front of a Y, in front of the Senior Center like literally tables and it was just –
And we certainly, we just didn’t know, we had no clue, and as soon as we put that plan in place, of course, then USDA said you could serve these meals, you can do the non-congregating setting in a school building.
So, at that point, our plan was so far in place, we just couldn’t change it at that moment. We had eight locations, and that was never going to be sustainable. We certainly could do it for a week. You could not do that as a sustainable thought process, the inclement weather, and we knew that we couldn’t manage handling serving hot food every single day. That wasn’t going to help our families.
We’re trying to keep them home and safe we didn’t want them coming out every single day, so then we switched quickly to a grab and go meal distribution, where we were really giving out frozen foods and using what we had in our inventory. We had all this food that was bulk, and you figure out, can we wrap some of this; trying to find individually wrapped items, trying to get deliveries in. All of that was just so overwhelmingly crazy.
And we here in Hartford distributed between that March and school starting in August of 2020, when we went back into a hybrid process. We distributed between breakfast and lunch, and in the beginning we could do snack and supper, but we did over 6,000,000 meals. We did a lot. We distributed a lot.
It was a lot of food. It was a lot of work. Physically, you’re lifting and packaging and it was a lot of work.
After we went through that process we got better and better at it, really got better and better at it, and did things like instead of packaging out individual servings of vegetables, we realized ‘Okay, this is foolish.’
We were distributing either two or three days’ worth of meals at a time. At that point we were distributing three days a week.
And so you could do it for seven days, you could do all seven days, and so we would bundle the vegetables for the whole amount of time versus one vegetable for each individual day.
We have a very robust Farm to School Program here in Hartford. We have a very strong commitment to our local growers and we actually have two community based organizations right here in Hartford. And I should say that we are a very urban setting.
So Hartford is in the center of Connecticut, and it’s an urban district, with a lot of concrete, so it’s not a ton of land around, and there’s these two great programs that have local produce, your farmer programs, and so we quickly got with them and said, “What’s happening? The restaurants are all closed.”
So we were able to use a lot of local produce, and get them by and help them. And we packaged and made these great local produce boxes for our families that had like zucchini and summer squash and green beans and some had potatoes and onions, and whatever they had. We were like ‘We can give these to our families, because we’re giving them food to take home to cook.’
So it really worked out well for that. We work with one of our local vendors, he makes our Jamaican beef patty, which in Hartford is a very staple item. We have a large Jamaican population.
Over 50% of our students are Hispanic, but we have a large Jamaican population, and we’ve used their product in our menus for many, many years. And they worked with us when all of the regulations changed about having to have whole grain. He worked with us and revamped his entire recipe to meet USDA standards and got it scan labeled, which was huge to do. So he was really one of our very first calls and we said, “Mike, what do you need? We need to make sure you stay in business. Can you keep up with that production? What do you need for us to help you to make sure that you can stay afloat?”
And so that was a great partnership. And then he would call some weeks to say, “I’m short on staff right now. Take me off the menu for next week. Put me on the following week.” So we worked with him.
So I think there were some blessings for some of them. We really were able to work with our local people and help them, because that was concerning to all of us. Everybody’s business closed and it just was crazy.
And then we went back into hybrid and so about half of our students were in the building on any given day, I think.
Working with a mask and all of that was just so much thought. Are we doing this safely? We certainly are good at cleaning and disinfecting and sanitizing, but now you add another layer.
Since the pandemic we have about 70 positions that are open and not filled. We have a part time work force, and we have a full time work force, and our full time work force were able to keep working throughout that entire pandemic when all of the schools were closed.
But when we went back to hybrid last year, quite a few of our part timers and some full timers resigned, did not come back, and so even today we have about 70-75 positions that are open.
In Hartford we have 44 schools in 48 or 9 buildings, and so it’s not a small district. Last year, what we did with hybrid for grades pre K-2, we packaged for each classroom and got it up to each classroom, and then the older kids either came down and ate in the cafeteria or they walked it back to their classroom, but we were able to package.
But this year when they had all the kids come back to full capacity we couldn’t do that, so all of our students now, we do grab and go breakfast carts in the mornings, and then they walk to their classrooms.
And then at lunchtime either they walk to the cafeteria and walk them back, or they have staggered and added more lunch breaks, so the kids can eat in the cafeteria.
We are probably serving four or 5,000 less lunches per day than we did pre-pandemic, so I’m not sure if some of those students have moved out of the district. We do not have a remote option, that’s not available in Connecticut, so you do need to be in school for academic learning. But I’m not sure what happened to those families.
Jeffrey Boyce
That’s quite a decrease.
Lonnie Burt
It’s quite a decrease. It’s noticeable, significantly noticeable, but, again, with all of the decrease in staffing it’s almost been a little bit of a blessing.
But I personally have been serving or cashiering on a regular, consistent basis and again at this size district that’s highly unusual, because I have a layer of supervisors and field managers that are between us and the schools. Each have their own set of schools, but we’ve just had to divide and conquer. So I’m looking behind me because, as we speak, I have my production records in my briefcase, because I knew that today might be a tough day, so I said to my staff, “If I have to go serve somewhere I’m going to go home and shower because I can’t be on this call with my hair all looking like…”
Jeffrey Boyce
How did you deal with packaging when you were sending everything out?
Lonnie Burt
So a couple things. It’s really just a bag system that looks like a tape machine, like a masking tape machine, and you drop the product into it. And then you take it and you just snap it right through the tape and it seals it. And so we did some of that.
And the beauty of that is, we have a color-coded system, you can get different color tapes, so we know on Mondays we use a blue tape, on Tuesdays another color, so we knew when we packaged it, we were able to keep track of it that way.
We also, here in Hartford specifically, have some packaging machinery, because about 35 of those schools have a full-service kitchen and have ovens and capability walk ins and serving lines and all that. So they get food and can cook and prep.
We have about 10 school buildings that don’t have kitchens in them. They only have re-serve ovens. So they have what’s called a Class 2 health license, where everything must be sealed and covered. You can’t do any cutting, chopping, any produce production. Everything has to come in ready to serve.
And so years ago now, it’s probably been about 10 or 15 years, we realized that that was such a limiting arena.
We also have some schools that don’t even have that. We have to cook it in one location and drive it over to that location.
And so we bought our first heat seal machine in 2008 with a grant. And it is a conveyor belt, machine like a conveyor belt. Think of a TV dinner. So when you get a Swanson’s TV dinner, it’s in compartmentalized sections where they seal Mylar on top of it, right, and you put it in the oven.
And when you take it out, you peel off that plastic topping, right, and then your food’s hot and available to you. Well, we have a machine like that.
And you get different sizes, single compartment, two compartment, three compartment, and we can plate our own meals for those schools that don’t have the ability to make production.
And we started doing that because what we found was we couldn’t get the same foods, the same quality of what we were doing in our production schools, we couldn’t find the same items already wrapped for our other schools, so we said, “We’re going to start packaging our own.” A couple years ago we wrote a USDA Farm to School implementation grant.
And we were awarded one, and in that grant what we got was an overflow machine. So that’s different than a heat seal. So the heat seal is TV dinner, it goes through and you rip off the top of it.
An overflow machine goes through a conveyor belt – and we did this because we wanted to start packaging our own breakfast kits with some fresh fruit, some local produce, cheese sticks. Things that you could get on the open market. And so that is more, think of a bag of potato chips or a bag of chips, you know how that has the crimped seals at each end of the bag?
And in the back what you’ll see is what’s called the thin seal, because think of that. It goes through a conveyor belt, right? And you have a big roll.
And now that roll has to come around, right? And it’s got a seal underneath, a thin seal.
And then you calibrate it depending upon what you’re packaging, how wide and how long you need it to crimp it at both ends. So we were able to package stuff and use some of our bulk inventory.
We had a whole bunch of beautiful barbecued turkey, we had some whole pizzas. So we were able to take some of the bulk food that we had and package it for our families. We did some of those, like with the barbecued turkey.
What we did was we just packaged it in a nice, big, like a five pounds, so that they can have enough for some meals. We gave them a package of rolls, and they can make their own barbecued turkey sandwiches. One Friday we had a whole bunch of the whole, round, individual pizzas. So one Friday we called it Pizza Night and we gave away the pizzas. They were going to go out of date. We weren’t going to be able to use them.
We certainly weren’t going to be cooking anytime soon, so we found real creative ways to use inventory that we already had, and also trying to get inventory individually wrapped. We worked with one company that put packages into three pound individual packages for us because, in the very beginning, remember, we were told cardboard packaging was dangerous, that it could hold the virus.
Some of those cases only had 30 portions in a case, and I had schools that were distributing 1,000 meal bags at a time. It was 10, 20, 30, 40 cases that they had to open for one item.
So we tried to work with manufacturers to get larger packaging, so we wouldn’t have to do all that. Since then of course we’ve learned better that we know that that’s not true.
And that it is much more airborne droplets, but you just think for us with some of that, like that constant things are changing. You don’t know what’s happening.
And so, then the supply chain issues were huge and a big piece of that was – all of us are plugging along – and Hartford has been a universal feeding program for many, many, many years. Since 1997, we have not charged students for food here in Hartford.
We’ve had some magnet schools that’ve been on and off that program, but, overall, our district has been a universal feeding program for many years.
But then you had all these school districts that were not, and now were, so their participation rates went up exponentially, right? I mean if you are normally serving 60% of your population and now you’re serving 90%, across this country, the consumption of food went up significantly and so that’s some of the supply chain issues, is that the manufacturers were just not prepared for the number of meals and items that people were ordering. And then they had problems with Covid and staffing. And then shipping had problems with Covid. It just was this huge chain of events that you just couldn’t control. So in the beginning, and even now looking over here at my desk, because I have my menu folder, but even now we’re looking at menus and inventories on a regular – at the beginning it was probably every other day, making sure it’s on the menu, it was ordered, when is it coming in?
And even now what we’re trying to do, we just placed our order for March, and I said to my staff, “I’m a little nervous we haven’t placed our April.”
One of the other things we have here is a warehouse, so I can get some food here without going through a distributor.
So we’ve already placed all of our March, and I’m a little nervous, because we need to be placing our April food orders. We needed to be consistently working two or three months ahead of time. There have been a few items that have been real challenging to get so we’ve chosen to take those off the menu.
And then what we did was we still try to order them and when they come in, then we say, “Okay, we’ll put it on the menu, because we already have it in inventory.” One of those items was French toast syrup, portion control syrup was a huge issue. We couldn’t get it.
And nobody wants French toast without that. My kids don’t want that. Without their syrup they’re not having it.
So we had to stockpile. We stockpiled until we had enough syrup, and then we stockpiled until we had enough of the French toast sticks, and then when we had enough of both we put them on the menu.
Jeffrey Boyce
Wow, that’s creative.
Lonnie Burt
It is creative in trying to do that, talking to your distributors regularly, like every day. “What’s coming?” At one point this year one of the distributors in our area chose to get out of the business, and so it left only the other distributor, who tried to help out as much as they can.
So, at one point they were probably about two weeks behind in their deliveries. My delivery that had food on it for next week wasn’t coming for two weeks.
So the menu items have already come and gone. Now, we had to figure out that. So we’ve gone down to our distributor to pick up food, we’ve done menu changes, we’ve done things like we even to this day still have two or three different menus.
Then, in my inventory we have menu items that we don’t have planned, in case we need to cook them as quick menu substitutions. So we have at least two or three full menu services that we do not have on our menu.
Jeffrey Boyce
It’s smart to have the backup.
Lonnie Burt
So that we know, in case something happens – Jeff, when I said to you earlier that this separated out the men – you had to have a skill set.
This wasn’t for just anybody. You had to have some skill set to really manage that and really know. Here in Hartford, even with 5,000 less or 4,000 less, we’re still serving almost 14,000 meals a day.
So when I’m looking, I’m not looking for two cases. I’m looking for 200 cases. And so you really had to put some thought into that. One of the things we learned too, in terms of our stuff that gets distributed, are delivered directly here to our warehouse, was to order in full pallets.
So we’ve really learned a lot with this process, because what we found was if you would just buy cases, then you’ve got this palette that was like half mixed.
And I’m counting portions. At this point there are menu services, hamburger being one of them, a beef burger or a cheeseburger, that we are so close on that I can’t spare a case. So I needed to make sure, because that, for some reason that’s been a challenge to get.
So you’re constantly looking at the inventory and saying, “Don’t let anybody take a case. They need to come to me and I’ll make the decision.”
Jeffrey Boyce
What was your lead time to order food before the pandemic?
Lonnie Burt
Before Covid, if I was sending March orders now I’d feel comfortable. I’m not comfortable that it’s January 24th and I haven’t sent April yet. I’m not comfortable with that because I need those.
Jeffrey Boyce
So it’s close to double.
Lonnie Burt
Yeah, close to double, and I’m hearing from the distribution side of it, that some of the stuff they’re ordering, now they need to give a 12 week lead time.
Jeffrey Boyce
Wow.
Lonnie Burt
So I’m saying to you now, they’re ordering stuff now that they’re hoping to get in April. That’s crazy. We’ve had a lot of substitutions, and we have a wonderful distributor who has been a great partner in this whole process. If you ordered a corn muffin and they didn’t have it, they at least sent me a blueberry muffin, instead of taking it off the order and not sending me anything. And so I appreciate the fact that well, maybe I had corn muffin on the menu. I don’t really care as long as there’s something to put on the menu.
Whether it’s blueberry or corn, it didn’t make a huge change for me. A couple of substitutions we’ve said, “No, we can’t.” Because allergies was the whole other issue.
So when they substituted honey nut cheerios with the nuts, I can’t use that. We don’t have nuts. Or when they substitute something that has soy in it, and the one you’re normally ordering is an allergen free item, you’ve got to know that, because we have to manage the allergies.
You’ve got all this stuff coming at you, and then worrying about your staff’s health and worrying about them and making sure that they’re following all the right protocols.
And the guidelines for the quarantine are changing, and keeping up with that. So it’s constant, it’s been a real constant, a lot of stuff.
So it’s been hard. I can’t say this is not hard, this is hard, okay. This has been really challenging to do.
Jeffrey Boyce
Have there been any blessings in disguise, things you’ve learned that you’ll stick with, hopefully, once this pandemic passes.
Lonnie Burt
Well, I would say some of the inventory management. Like I said, ordering, and the pallets, when those pallets come in, we’re really tracking it.
Not that we weren’t really tracking before, but we are like queen bees knees, because we’re all over that. We’re really good with that.
Not that I didn’t know it before, because I certainly did. Your best asset is your staff and I’m very clear that you’re only as good as they are. And I have always been clear about that, but the amazing employees that we have, who have just worked throughout this entire process, especially in the beginning, when everyone was working remotely from home, food service staff was on these front lines.
Again, I feel very differently today about even being out in public myself than I did in March of 2020. You didn’t know what was happening all around you, and it was very scary.
It’s not so scary now. I mean it’s concerning, don’t get me wrong. It’s very concerning, but scary, it’s not as it was then, so the fact that our staff showed up every day and said, “We need to be here,” just was amazing to me.
Jeffrey Boyce
That is pretty amazing.
Lonnie Burt
Absolutely, an amazing group of people, and that’s not just Hartford, trust me. That’s any school program, every food service person, any director would say the same thing about their staff.
I probably as an adult get bored with our menus significantly quicker and faster than our students do, and I think that’s one of the things that I’ve had to learn to let go of, is they don’t have to be so fancy. They have to just be good, and our students just need to get the food they want, so that they will consume it, because anybody who knows me knows what I’ll say next, which is, “It’s not nutritious unless you actually chew it and swallow it.”
Jeffrey Boyce
That’s a good point.
Lonnie Burt
If you don’t chew it and swallow it, there’s absolutely no nutrition involved in it whatsoever. So I think some of that has been an interesting line for me.
Jeffrey Boyce
Have you had issues maintaining the quality of the meals?
Lonnie Burt
What we had to do – so that’s an awesome question – and I would say that we’ve been able to stay with the majority of the foods that are on our bid, as is with our chicken and the products, and I will say to you, we’re not the low-end purchasers here, so we’re using like all whole muscle products and things on menu. Where we did have to compromise was in our fresh produce, because we don’t have the staff to do all that cutting and chopping.
And so we are absolutely using fresh produce, and we are absolutely using local fresh produce, which again is a huge commitment here and we believe in that.
But what we’re doing that in is in a hot vegetable more. So we’re using Swiss chard, and we were before, always Swiss chard, callaloo, which is a Jamaican spinach, collards, butternut squash, but what we don’t have a lot of on our menu right now is all the vegetable sticks with the dip.
You know, the kind of lovely pepper strips. All of that stuff we don’t have for two reasons. We just don’t have the staff. So a school that normally has six to eight people in it, right now might have three and on a good school fully staffed would be four, when they normally need eight. So it is significant.
And I don’t see that changing at all this year or next. There’s nobody applying for jobs, and again that’s not Hartford. I’m hearing that everywhere, with all of my colleagues.
So that’s where we’ve had to do some compromising, is in that area. And also the dip, because manufacturers, aside from the labor, they had a real shortage in the raw materials, the pulp paper raw material that you need to make all those containers with.
So the dip, the pull top, the condiments, ketchup, so what we had to do is to kind of hoard.
So we normally would put ketchup out with 20 different items, whatever. I don’t care what you put ketchup on it, the ketchup helps you to eat it, I’m fine with that, but we had to say, “No, we’re only putting ketchup out on the chicken day and the hamburger day,” because we need to make sure we have enough ketchup. We can’t get ketchup.
We didn’t put out any syrup for breakfast, with the hot breakfast, like we do many pancakes.
We had chicken and waffles is one of our menus. We can’t find those waffles or syrup, so now we’re just doing the oven roasted leg. We put a vegetable on it, and a biscuit instead of the waffle. So we’ve had to modify a few things.
A couple items we had to take off because you just can’t get it. Salisbury steak. We can’t get it. Again, so we move on, you know, you just kind of have to. We kept putting it on the menu. I kept saying to myself, “Why are we doing this?” Every time it’s on the menu, we had to take it off anyway, so now we’ve just taken it off the menu, and if we can get it then we order it. If it comes, then I’ll take something else off the menu and add it on. And the beauty of – we’re just about done with that April menu – is, if you do it far enough in advance, I can make a menu change to another menu you haven’t seen posted yet, so you don’t realize it’s a menu change, whereas I realized it’s a menu change.
So you don’t see it as the consumer. So that’s what we’ve tried to do, so there’s not a lot of disruption to the actual schools or the nurses or parents, who are looking at a menu and think that’s what we’re serving today, so we’ve really tried to do that.
Paper has been a huge challenge. So the trays. So we’ve had to really look at what are we serving this food item on?
We have schools that have dish machines, about half our schools have dish machines, but we don’t have the labor. So we had to compromise and say, “Can you at least do a couple of lunch ways, so that you can order less trays, because we can’t get the trays?”
With the pre-pack schools, those schools where the TV dinners go, those are already sealed container, so the high school level we didn’t send them anything. Those kids can carry the container, put it on your book, whatever you want to do, but we don’t have a tray to give you so that you can throw away a tray that holds a container that’s already got your food in it. So we had to compromise, I think is probably a better word, and really kind of reassess what were we doing and where can we make some wiggle room.
Jeffrey Boyce
You’ve talked a little about this with your distributor, but have you been able to deal with or form other partnerships with other community organizations to help you to meet your mission?
Lonnie Burt
I have not had to here with this. These are all bids here in Hartford.
I’m a huge USDA Foods person. Processing. Love that program. I’ve been around a long time and prior to the years when you could do processing, never really used all the entitlement dollars we had in the programs, and so I love being able to pick and choose the items.
And so we have our RFP with all our manufacturers, and some of them just deliver directly here, a couple of our bigger ones deliver directly here.
And so those partnerships I think were extremely important. Some communicated well and others didn’t.
I think that was a key issue here, and I will say to you that the companies who have communicated well with me I’m going to really be loyal to. I’ve had a couple companies I haven’t heard anything from, and orders don’t show up, or they do. I don’t know what’s going on.
And, to be honest with you, I don’t have time to hunt that down and I don’t think that I should, as the customer. That’s been my biggest frustration in terms of manufacturing and distribution.
Our actual local distributor has been outstanding. They’re our prime vendor and have been and won the majority of the items on the bid, but our secondary vendor said at the end of September, “We’re not delivering to you anymore, for the rest of the year. We’re done.”
And Hartford’s one of the largest districts in Connecticut, so the fact that you would kick us to the curb is really interesting to me.
But, more importantly, that our prime vendor tried to help out every time we called them then, and said, “Oh my god, Vendor B isn’t delivering to us anymore, we don’t know what to do.” And so I applaud them for doing everything they could. They send us out a list every week.
These are the items that are being discontinued. These are the items that we have in inventory right now. These items are going to be in short supply. Like I knew long before cereal started getting into short supply that Zero is going to start to be a challenge. I knew mustard – so that kind of communication is extremely important to me, because I can make a menu change and not put cereal on five days a week if you’re not going to get it. So I applaud them.
Jeffrey Boyce
They sound like a really well-run company.
Lonnie Burt
They’re a well-run company and what they are is a company who’s committed to K-12 food service, and not every company is, because it’s not a huge profit margin in K-12, and we’re all looking to squeeze pennies. And so what I really appreciate about them is that they understood we need to get food and it needs to be whole grain and it can’t just be anything you sell on the streets, and so I love the fact that they have a real connected K-12 market and that’s important to us, obviously.
Jeffrey Boyce
It looks like you’ve covered just about everything I had to ask. Is there anything else you’d like to add today?
Lonnie Burt
I would say to you that I would like to just make sure that people understand, even in the middle of a pandemic, every food service person that I know that’s in child nutrition had one goal and that was to make sure kids got fed. And that’s what I saw throughout this country. We all found creative ways to do it, we all made sure that we showed up and stood up and we fed children.
And I think that’s really what I want to make sure that people do understand. It’s been challenging. And again, I’m old, I’m overwhelmed with all that’s happening at this time. It this constant, so I can’t even imagine like being a new director or somebody who doesn’t have the depth of experience that I do, to be able to maneuver through some of this stuff. It was just so much coming at you, but –
Jeffrey Boyce
That was going to be my follow up question. What would you tell directors who are out there today who may not be having the successes that you are? Any words of wisdom for them?
Lonnie Burt
I would say my best words of wisdom is to really start planning ahead, so if you’re struggling with distribution and struggling with deliveries and struggling on that end, then I would say you need to truly make sure you are writing these menus. It’s January now. I’m hoping, even if you don’t have the ability to warehouse like I do, that you’re still looking at that March and that April menu, because your distributor needs to know what to bring in for you.
Okay, have those conversations so, for example, my distributor knows today that the pizza that’s coming in that they’ve ordered, they know I need 700 cases of that to get me through. They know today what I need for April, what I need for March, what I need for May. They know that. And the days of thinking you can just pick up the phone and call in an order today for tomorrow or the next day, have long come and gone and I don’t see that coming back.
I don’t see manufacturers are going to want to get stuck with it, because what happened in March of 2020 is, think this through, all those companies all had tons of inventory, bulk inventory.
And districts that didn’t have the ability to package, or the wherewithal to think that through, especially in the beginning, all just ordered IW products, individually wrapped products, and now you had all these manufacturers that had bulk inventory, cases and cases and cases, and they’re not going to get burned again. Because some of them lost it, had to throw out product I’m sure.
Manufacturers aren’t going to have this huge car levels that they’ve had in the past. You’re going to need to be organized enough. If you don’t have a cycle menu, you need to write a cycle menu. There’s no way you can be writing a different menu every single month. Write a cycle menu, again, so you know the kinds of quantities you need every month, and your distributor can start. Send them the menu. We send our distributor the menu. They have our January and February and our published March menu already in front of them, so they know, okay, in March Hartford’s looking for this, this, this, and this. I need to make sure my buyers know that.
They’ve got to have some good communication, so I think that’s extremely important. I would say to you, if you are new, find a mentor.
Find somebody around you that’s been doing this. Talk to them. Ask questions. Don’t be afraid. You’re not in this alone and don’t reinvent the wheel. We all share.
I’m happy to share anything that I have, any Excel spreadsheet, any menu, any ordering form, whatever that is. Share. Ask. People will help, and so you’re not in this by yourself, and it is overwhelming.
And then, make sure you know what your district expects. Again, with all the protocol – and I’m in charge of all the PPE. On top of all of this I’m doing all of the masks and the craziness and the gloves and the disinfectant and the hand sanitizer and all of that. So make sure you know what your district wants. I would say that to the new people. Have a plan and communicate that plan and ask your staff, because I’ll say to you, they were great helping in saying, “It’s too much to bundle these items together,” or “These bags weigh too much,” and that’s the kind of information you need. I’ve personally been serving, so I was out there serving with a product that I was just not happy with. It was just not working well on the serving line, so I called the manufacturing and said, “I gotta figure this out because I don’t need another thousand cases at this price. It’s not working for us.” And so know that. Get out there and make sure you see what your staff are struggling with. They’re struggling with something, I can guarantee you.
Jeffrey Boyce
Well thanks so much for taking the time for me today. It’s been a pleasure.
Lonnie Burt
I hope it was helpful.
