Scratch Cooking

• Scratch cooking exposes children to a wider variety of foods, flavors and textures - and builds a robust and curious interest in a variety of foods at a young age, setting them up for better health outcomes as adults.

• Scratch cooking can help solve staffing shortages by offering more full-time jobs to local district residents along with good benefits and a job with purpose and mission. While it does take more labor to produce meals from scratch, the input costs of purchasing the raw ingredients is less. A district that decides to do scratch cooking verses convenience foods, basically flips the cost of labor and food - either way the total food and labor costs add up to about 90%.

• Additionally, schools can help to eliminate some of the not-so-great ingredients found in highly processed foods. School nutrition professionals get great satisfaction and job enrichment by creating their recipes that students love.

• Scratch cooking resolves a fair amount of dependency on the manufacturing cycle, which means less frustrations with supply chain challenges.

• There are many entry points into scratch cooking - it's best to start out slow, gain skills, confidence and momentum and continue to build and expand capacity.

• Menu planning is fun and creative with scratch cooking!

More examples of scratch food menus - beef stir fry, scratch-made BBQ pulled Pork, scratch-made cole slaw, scratch-made cornbread muffins, scratch-made pickled beets, scratch-made dressings.