Our goal at Downey Unified Food Services is to provide our students with freshly prepared, high-quality meals because, as you know, our students deserve the best! As part of these efforts, we are proud to work with Brigaid to take the meals we serve our students to the next level. Though we’ve always diligently planned and prepared healthy meals with our on-staff nutritionist, Brigaid has helped us take our goals a step further.
Brigaid is an organization of professional chefs who help food service teams at schools and other institutions achieve their nutrition goals. Our partnership kicked off in the summer of 2023 when Brigaid performed a program assessment at each of our 20 school sites and our warehouse to assess our facilities, equipment, capacity, and other performance indicators. They then worked with us on developing a strategic plan to meet our goals.
As part of the program, a Brigaid Chef (Brad Long), joined us in February 2024. Chef Brad works with our team, providing training, leading recipe development, and streamlining our processes. In his time with us, he’s developed new recipes and helped us polish up existing ones. His recipes include the turkey grilled cheese, oatmeal with a fresh-made berry sauce, and birria pupusa with freshly prepared curtido.
While all of our schools will benefit from the program, our primary goal is to elevate our elementary school recipes and menus, introducing our youngest students to a variety of healthy meal options and setting them up for success in building healthy habits in the future.
Check back soon for information about new recipes developed from the program and to learn more about Chef Brad!