Fourth grader Journei Donelson says she misses the taco salads after Adelante Schools changed the breakfast and lunch menus at her school. But the “Breakfast Brownie” is a big hit.
“I can’t lie,” said Donelson, who attends Emma Donnan Elementary and Middle School. “The breakfast is good!”
Breakfast Brownie is code for chocolate zucchini bread, said Matthew Feltrop, executive director of the Patachou Foundation. The team also uses words like “fresh made” instead of “healthy” when speaking with students in an attempt to speak kids’ language and get them excited about a new kind of school lunch.
It’s all part of a growing effort to ensure that Indianapolis kids have access to quality meals while feeling like they also have a voice in what they eat.
“They’re not shy. They will tell you what they think about food, and there’s no ego in this work,” Feltrop said. “We’re trying to make a plate of food that’s really high quality, that we can be proud of and that students really want to eat.”
The Patachou Foundation launched its PataSchool initiative in 2021 and works with schools such as Emma Donnan on the south side and Circle City Prep on the far east side to reimagine their meal programs. PataSchool expanded this year to include Purdue Polytechnic’s Englewood campus — the initiative’s first high school partner.
The Patachou Foundation uses its culinary experience to help schools transition from a traditional smaller, ready-made kitchen environment to a fully functioning scratch-made operation.The effort, which includes regular family surveys, has worked to create a school meal that kids want to eat. On any given day, program leaders say 90% to 95% of Emma Donnan’s 460 students participate in the program. Most of those students qualify for free and reduced price meals based on their family income, which makes the school’s role in providing a nourishing meal all the more important.
“Being a community school means that your kids are safe with us, your kids are taken care of, and that includes making sure they get great food,” said Jordan Habayeb, chief operating officer of Adelante Schools. “It also ensures that we have sustaining systems that do support our families.”
Getting back to scratch-made meals
The scratch-made method of cooking was abandoned decades ago in favor of pre-packaged, heat-and-serve meals that administrators believed could be produced in smaller kitchens by fewer people at a lower cost.
PataSchool, however, exists to flip that narrative.
The Patachou Foundation, launched by Cafe Patachou creator Martha Hoover in 2013, has been helping Indianapolis community partners fight youth hunger since its founding. The nonprofit launched PataSchool in 2021 to support in-school efforts to transition to fully scratch-led cooking.
Take Emma Donnan, for example. When operator Adelante took over the IPS-affiliated charter school in 2020, Habayeb said his team knew they wanted to offer a different lunch experience.
The kitchen — built in the 1960s before the shift away from scratch cooking — already had lots of space to work with. Adelante leaders set funding aside and sought state and federal grants to help buy the expensive equipment needed to get them started.
The school hired more staff, growing its small kitchen team from two to nine. Adelante also connected with local vendors, frequently used by restaurants, to secure large quantities of ingredients typically unseen in school kitchens, such as dry rice, beans and spices.
And the Indianapolis Colts provided a $1 million donation, helping the school redesign its cafeteria space and rebrand it as a new “Colts Commons.”
The Patachou partnership is showing early success. Attendance is up 15% this year at Emma Donnan.
“There’s a lot that goes into that,” Habayeb said of the increase, “but one of the pieces is knowing that I’m going to have a warm plate of biscuits and gravy to start my day instead of, like, a dried granola bar.”
With time, he said, the program has also become self-sustaining.
What’s for lunch?
Because students are given choice and food is reused wherever possible, Habayeb said, the school has found it actually saves money by throwing less food away.
Whatever’s not used to make a meal gets stored for families who can request a take-home meal kit through a digital app. Students are encouraged to place food they don’t eat on a “share cart” at the center of the lunch room for their classmates to choose from if they’re still hungry after they finish their meal.
Adelante also purchased a conveyor dishwasher during its kitchen renovation, eliminating paper products where possible and serving students meals from reusable bowls and utensils like you’d find in a kitchen at home. The changes have resulted in a 70% reduction in food scraps and paper waste.
Fruits, veggies and scratch-made dips and sauces — such as a carrot hummus, homemade ranch or chocolate banana hummus — are served daily. However, the kitchen team rotates its entree options to make sure meals stay interesting. Students are given a choice of one of three different entrees every day.
Monday could bring a choice of spaghetti and meat sauce, a club wrap or chicken caesar salad while Thursday could offer lemon pepper chicken, a turkey and cheese sub or a chef’s salad.
The meal team regularly surveys students. They conduct Yelp-style reviews asking students how many stars they’d give a meal.
Donelson and her classmates’ longing for the school’s old, pre-packaged taco salad, for example, could have been the inspiration behind the recent introduction of tacos and guacamole.
Fifth grader Bryan Gurerro says he likes the chicken fajitas most.
“I like how they’re like soft and tasty,” Gurerro said.
Other breakfast and lunch favorites include scratch-made biscuits and gravy, pancakes and chicken teriyaki. Frank Cox’s role as head chef at Emma Donnan has quickly become his favorite career move.
Connecting with students
Cox was a grill master at Red Lobster and a kitchen manager at Prodigy Burger before joining the Emma Donnan kitchen in February.
He likes knowing that his work ensures that kids won’t go home hungry. The hours — starting around 6 or 7 a.m. and wrapping up by 3 p.m. — aren’t bad, either.
“It’s fulfilling to be able to put to use what I went to school for,” Cox said, “and to give kids meals that I didn’t get to have when I was in middle school. These kids deserve it. They deserve their good food.”
Like students, staff eat free, and adults in the school say it’s a meal they look forward to. Habayeb says it’s a win for teachers who no longer need to worry about packing a lunch. It also sends a message to students.
“If you’re working lunchroom duty and you’re sitting down next to a kid and eating the exact same thing, that’s a really powerful shared experience to have,” he said. “It just brings down one more barrier of ‘why are you standing next to me eating something completely different?’”
The fully equipped kitchen also now gives Emma Donnan the ability to cater its own school events and, something the school hopes to grow into more, get creative in matching the themes of what students are learning in the classroom.
For example, kitchen staff recently served a special Hispanic Heritage Month menu to tie into lessons. The team also hopes to roll out more self-serve options allowing kids to pick veggies they like to build their own salads.
As for Donelson, the fourth grader has been a tough audience and is perhaps the perfect example of why Adelante offers different options. Donelson says lunch at her school is just OK. She thinks some of what the school serves is good, but other things she never gets.
She’s giving lunch a chance, though. She eats at school every day, and she’ll always keep coming back for breakfast.
“Never judge your school,” Donelson said. “Because they can learn how to cook better.”