Podcast

Transcript

Josh (00:00)

All right, everyone, welcome back to another episode of the 5 in 20 podcast by Remarkable Academic Foods. I'm your host, Joshua Miller, and we have another five or so questions in 20-something minutes. And today's guest is Justin Oas from the Chimacum School District in Washington. So he is a registered dietitian. He has the dietary background, but he's also the food service director for the school district as well.

As well as a culinary instructor. So he's got a little dual role there and some great insights for us based on his experience. So make sure you stick around. We're gonna also talk a little bit about grants and hopefully opening up some opportunities for you to make sure that you're knowledgeable about the grant opportunities that are out there and not being afraid to go in and put in those applications. So make sure you stick around for this casual conversation with Justin and we'll be right back.

All right, Justin, welcome and thank you for joining in on this episode with me today. I'm excited to speak with you and get to learn more about you as well as bring some more valuable insights to the audience here. And to start the episode off my icebreaker, as always, is what is your guilty pleasure, snack or food?

Justin Oas (01:23)

Okay, well thank you Joshua, thank you for having me. I appreciate you taking the time to have me on. I don't know, I'm always, I'm a salty guy, not a sweet guy, so like, I love chips, crackers, and dip, that kind of stuff. That's like my go-to snack food.

Josh (01:38)

Yeah, nice. I'm salty for sure. I love my salty sweet especially and my wife She is all about cheese. So that is definitely speaking her language cheese and crackers. Like that's her go-to snack for sure. So awesome. Well, thank you again. So let's just start off by just kind of giving us a quick review of your role in the Chimacum School District.

Justin Oas (02:03)

Sure, so I started here in Chimacum School District. So I've just hit my little over six month mark. My first job in school nutrition, so total career change, I was in healthcare before. And I kinda always wanted to go into schools, that was kinda my passion, just trying to find the opportunity. And this position opened up for what's kind of a part-time director position. And then they added on culinary arts teaching as a CTE teacher. So again, another new one for me because I hadn't taught before. Other than nutrition education with adults, but with children and kids, it's a little bit different. So I just kind of jumped in and figured things out along the way. It's been a lot of fun. I really enjoy it. I love what we're doing. I love coming here every day. 

So it's nice to actually have a job where I feel like I'm making a difference and I look forward to going to work and working hard.

Josh (03:04)

Love it. And more power to you for jumping into two completely different roles at the same time and figuring that out. So what's harder? Is it teaching kids or is it teaching adults since you've had experience with both?

Justin Oas (03:11)

Yeah.

So I'm teaching 9 through 12. And that first semester, we just finished our first semester, so we're in semester two now. It was pretty rough the first couple of weeks. It's trying to keep them engaged for a long period of time. And I don't know, I think teaching was a little bit harder than I thought it was going to be. I like talking about food. I like talking about cooking. So I was like, oh, this is going to be just go in. But trying to teach my first class, I had 31 students. You know?

Josh (03:20)

Yep, that's a decent sized class. Yeah.

Justin Oas (03:50)

In the beginning of the semester. Yeah, so when you have that many kids and you're trying to teach them knife skills, it's a little chaotic. So I think that was the steeper learning curve for me. Aside from the director position, I know kitchens and I know menus and recipes, so it's just learning a lot of ins and outs with USDA requirements versus, you know what I used to follow. So I don't know, they're both challenging but in a good way.

Josh (04:19)

Good, good. So you've had success with grants and have a couple of pending grant applications out there for programs. So tell us a little bit about some that you've had success with and you know, the program improvements that come with it.

Justin Oas (04:37)

Sure, yeah. So in my prior role when I was in healthcare, I had success with some grants that we did with some long-term care facilities. That was kind of my introduction to grant writing and that process. I will say in this capacity of working with the schools, the grant writing process is much easier. It's much more streamlined.

There's a website that we use where they post a lot of grants from USDA through Washington State. So it's called iGrants and we've had, actually we just got an award letter yesterday for another grant that I submitted.

Josh (05:15)

Congratulations!

Justin Oas (05:18)

Yeah, thank you. It's a small one, but every little one helps make a big difference. So this is just for plant-based meals. We have one for farm-to-school and a supply chain grant. We have a couple of other ones out there, one that I'm waiting on. I hope it will get our class to do some remodeling with the class.

Josh (05:20)

Exactly, exactly.

Justin Oas (05:37)

I just think that there are so many opportunities for grants. I mean, you can just keep applying, keep applying, and all those little pots of money can make a big difference in what you can do for the students every day.

Josh (05:46)

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, being able to get a grant to improve the classroom experience, I think that's really cool and kind of unexpected. But if it's out there and for the taking, absolutely put your hand up for it and see if you can get any of that. Because I mean, culinary programs in high schools, I feel like are definitely kind of undercover. Like they're there, but they don't get a whole lot of attention, I feel like. But I feel like there's more out there than people realize in terms of the high school programs.

So, and so you've had other grants outside of even the school nutrition sector as well that have succeeded, correct?

Justin Oas (06:24)

Yeah, so when the company I worked for before, long-term care skilled nursing, we actually had two different grants that I worked with, a company called Elder Grow. So they do roller gardens for senior living, a really cool program where they do a lot of gardening and education and activities with seniors that are in long-term care. So we did two different grants for three years with them, which is just awesome.

Josh (06:48)

Love it. And you've also sort of inherited one. You were coming into the school district and there was one that was out for the food truck. That's a part of the culinary training program there, correct?

Justin Oas (07:02)

Yeah.

That's correct. Yeah, I came in at a really great time. You know, Chimicum, the district and the community here is just like so involved and supportive of the school or small district. But there's a big focus on these career and technical education pathways for students. And one of them, you know, I think in 2020, they got a grant along with working with this community wellness project, which is an organization here in the community that supports the schools. They purchased a food truck, I believe it was a barbecue truck, and they retrofitted it. And it was years in the making to get it off the ground and we finally launched in December and got the food truck at an event here at the school.

We just had another event last week where we did a home basketball game.

It's incorporated into the classroom framework, where the students will work on the truck. They'll learn how to operate a truck, how to write menus and recipes, how to cook on the truck, and customer service. It's really awesome. It's so fun doing the menu, working with the kids, and serving the community.

Justin Oas (08:16)

So, and I believe, as far as I know, we're the first in the state of Washington to have something like this that's been up and running where it's actually integrated with students operating the truck, which is pretty amazing.

Josh (08:26)

That is very, very cool. And hopefully that gives them some inspiration because food truck is a great route to go in, in terms of if you want to get your own brick and mortar location one day, a food truck is a nice baby step, lesser investment, less risk, but it has the potential for some really high rewards. So that's very cool that they get to experience that at a young, young age into this hopefully blossoming career for them. And personally, I'm a little intrigued about how much food trucks are going to continue to get incorporated into K-12 outside of that. I even read that there's a school district where they were actually making, they had a food truck that's a part of the lunch program where they travel to different school sites and they can offer lunches that are part of the National School of Lunch program. So I'm intrigued to see how the food truck scene continues to evolve for K-12 because we know it's big in the college and university world. So I think that there's definitely some opportunity in that area as well, starting with exactly the one that you guys got there.

Justin Oas (09:29)

Yeah, yeah, I agree. And I think, you know, it's, it's neat to be able to offer them that experience where they feel like they're working in a real business, in a real kitchen, while they're still here on campus. Um, and yeah, we have lots of ideas and hopes for what we can do with it. You know, like I said, we just launched, we're just getting off the ground. So we're building the program slowly, but I agree. I think there's lots of opportunities.

Josh (09:38)

Love it.

Yep. And so let's take a shift here. Let's talk about, so your background,

so not only are you a registered dietitian, so you, you don't just have a bachelor's, you have a master's degree, correct?

Justin Oas (10:03)

Correct, yep. So I went back to school a few years back, kind of knowing I wanted to go into K-12 in some capacity. And I got my master's in education and health and wellness, which not knowing where I was gonna end up, it worked out timing wise just perfect.

Josh (10:09)

Nice, and I'm sure that came in great use. So you worked for Whole Foods for a little while and they have a software called Chef Tech, which I briefly looked at to see what it's all about. So can you explain to us, you know, what is that Chef Tech software, what is it all about and what were you able to accomplish in it?

Justin Oas (10:39)

Yeah, so I worked for Whole Foods. I interned with them in college and ended up staying on after and worked with their healthy eating team. And so we use the software called Chef Tech, which is kind of a recipe menu software. So there's a lot of capabilities. There's different levels. What we were doing with it was nutrition analysis. So we were working on customer facing recipes for the prepared foods department. So when you go downstairs and you go to their salad bar or any of their hot foods that they're serving, we wanted to have nutritional information with those.

That's out there for people to purchase. And we also wanted to have, we were building a rating system. So we had different ways of how we'd categorize food, depending on sodium content, sugar, and all this, and we'd have a rating. So what my job was is I was using Chef Tech, and we'd put in the recipes, analyze nutrition, and build nutrition labels. And this was when FDA was making changes to requirements for the nutritional information that you had to have. So we were trying to get ahead of that before it was actually implemented.

But I know that the software, you can use it in a lot of other capacities for recipe costing and for management of your ingredients, which is not really what we were using it for. But it was a good glimpse into what's out there as far as nutrition and menu software.

Josh (12:00)

Yeah, and I'm sure that helped you in another way, preparing for this role that you're in now, because as you know, menus and recipes, building those up from nothing is a huge undertaking. It can be a little bit overwhelming. I've been through it. I've seen it happen with other organizations, and it is not an easy.

Justin Oas (12:29)

Yeah, I don't remember the number of recipes we did. It was somewhere in the tens of thousands of recipes that we went through. That was a lot.

Josh (12:33)

Uh, wow. Wow. I thought that I had a pretty high number. That puts my number to shame what they're doing.

Justin Oas (12:43)

This was over a long period of time and we had a team of us.

Josh (12:45)

That's crazy. That's crazy. That's insights from not only the nutritional side, but also the creative side as well, right? Because, I mean, you've seen all kinds of recipes come through. All right. So, you know, for the chefs, for the directors that are out there, you know, whether it's K-12, whether it's college campuses, you know, there are still people out there that don't have that kind of background where they've been able to help build out a recipe program that is has those nutritionals in the background and building that up from the ground up, what advice would you give to those that are out there thinking about getting into that kind of a system?

Justin Oas (13:27)

Well, like you said, there's a lot of options. There's a lot of ways to go about it. And different schools have different needs depending on the size of the district too so that can make it more challenging. I know for me coming in, we didn't have anything built out. So I've been kind of doing it with school and just building a menu cycle. There's a lot of resources online, just go through USDA, they have like their team nutrition. There's a website like called the Lunchbox.

Project Bread is another one. So they have pre-approved recipes that you can use for K-12. So if you don't wanna build your recipe and get all the nutrition information, you can start there, pull those recipes and you can build your menu cycle that way and then you can always grow from there. I just think being organized is key.

We built out our menu cycle so we know what we're going to be preparing every week, a month at a time, and it makes it a lot more simple to make little changes along the way when you have something to build off of a foundation. There's a lot of resources out there too. I always would recommend reaching out to other directors and seeing what they're doing and seeing what they're using. I've done that. I've visited a couple other campuses in our area just to see what they're doing and I've gotten some great ideas that way too.

Josh (14:39)

Absolutely.

Yeah, big word collaboration. And as I start to meet other directors that are in K-12, school nutrition, and some of them are like yourself. Like they haven't been in the field, they're experienced in hospitality industry, but they haven't done this, which is, it's good to see that C word that I love, which is collaboration happening amongst everyone in the industry and throughout. 

But definitely important for everyone to realize that there are resources out there and to know that you don't have to necessarily start from a blank piece of paper and a pen. So not only with regard to the menu and recipe development, but even with the grants, I mean, I'm surprised. I just spoke with the school district the other week and they had no idea that there were even grant opportunities out there. So, you know, definitely spreading the word that there are resources out there to help. And that goes for colleges as well. I mean, if there's, it doesn't have to be exactly food related.

Josh (15:41)

I know that there's big rebate opportunities in Pennsylvania, for example, for equipment, for anyone that wants to transition to electrical equipment. So there's all kinds of opportunities. It's really just going and looking what kind of resources are out there and finding them, not only for the grants, but also the menu and recipe development. So great, thank you. Thank you for tuning in for this episode with me and joining the audience here. So where can people go to connect with you and continue any parts of the conversation if they're interested?

Justin Oas (16:13)

So I would say probably LinkedIn is the best. I'm not a social media guy. I don't use anything else. So, but yeah, so on LinkedIn, just reach out to me through there. That's probably easiest. That's what I check pretty regularly.

Josh (16:16)

Me neither.

Yep, exactly. I have no other accounts except LinkedIn. Facebook I created I think, well, gosh, I want to say 15 years ago and I logged in once and never back in again. No other social media. It's just who I am. So even LinkedIn was just recently. So no concerns there. That's not for everyone, right?

Well, thank you again, Justin, for everything that you're doing. It sounds like you got some great things underway with the Chimacum School District and everyone, including yourself, I call it Remarkable Academic Food Ambassadors because you're helping to spread the word. You're helping to continue progression in the school food service world. So thank you for everything you're doing. And everyone, thank you for tuning in for another episode. I'm your host, Joshua Miller. And until next time, signing off.