Wello in partnership with Northeast Wisconsin Technical College will create a paid culinary traineeship based in the Green Bay Public Schools kitchens using grant funds from the USDA Food and Nutrition Service.
The USDA recently granted REAP Food Group an Innovation Collaborative Award via the Illinois Public Health Institute to pursue a project linking college-level culinary students with school kitchens. The grant award was $250,000 shared across six partners over the next 30 months including Wello and Rooted in Green Bay and Madison respectively.
With the funds, REAP and partners will plan and carry out the “School Nutrition Culinary Innovators of Tomorrow” Project in the Madison and Green Bay areas over the next two and a half years.
The traineeship in Green Bay will help school kitchens address current labor shortages that limit their ability to produce meals from scratch while exposing culinary students to the career possibilities in schools. Culinary students will also have the opportunity to learn from local growers in their areas to better understand how to move local foods from the field to the school cafeteria.
REAP and Wello hope the pilot traineeship will build out the infrastructure needed for continuation and expansion of the traineeship after the conclusion of the grant.
“This project brings together so many amazing partners… to address an issue schools across the country are facing; labor shortages in school kitchens. By supporting school nutrition programs now and growing school nutrition professionals for the future, school kitchens are able to grow scratch cooking efforts featuring locally-grown and culturally-relevant foods,” said REAP Farm to School Director, Allison Pfaff Harris.
