Greenville County Schools
When Joe Urban became the Director of Greenville County Schools Food and Nutrition in 2014 , he and his team created a vision for the future meal program that included higher quality, local, fresh foods, scratch-cooked options, greater satisfaction among the student body, and healthier long term habits. “We knew this wouldn’t happen overnight but there was a lot of low hanging fruit that we could address right away while working towards the bigger changes.” Right away, he established a relationship with a produce distributor and instructed school managers to swap canned and frozen fruits with fresh options. This was a big but relatively easy change in produce-rich South Carolina that put minimal additional pressure on staff. The impact was immediate, transforming the look of the serving line as well as the quality of the produce.
Over time, they expanded the number of local producers serving the district by encouraging farmers to become GAP certified (Good Agricultural Practices). And with more local, fresh supply, Urban encouraged the 100 school cafeterias in the district to serve as many fruit and vegetable options as they could every day. “On any given day if you go to Greenville, you're going to see three to six different varieties of fresh fruit. If we want kids to consume more fresh fruits and vegetables, we need to give them options. Everyone won’t like apples and oranges every day. Not everyone will like melons or strawberries but if I have all of those out there, chances are that there's going to be one item that students are going to like and take. So when we started doing that, we immediately realized more fresh fruit consumption with our students.”
To make the transition to higher quality meals, Urban needed to invest in staff training. “I wanted our staff to know how to cook vegetables properly and understand why we were building menus the way we were.” Educating the staff on how to follow recipes, how to batch cook, and why that's important for the customer experience became a central part of training and key to the overall mission to improve school food. “If a child’s first experience with broccoli is a gray, overcooked, soggy version, it is probably dead to them for the rest of school. So we teach how to steam the broccoli quickly, to keep the green color so it looks better, tastes better, and has higher nutritional content.” They then advocated for a production kitchen equipped with the tools needed to do more scratch cooking. With the school board’s support, Urban was able to invest in this kitchen and magnify the impact of the program. Higher participation resulted, which provided surplus revenue to reinvest in more local products, training, and other quality improvement measures.
Urban retired from Greenville County Schools in 2024 and is now the CEO of School Food Rocks.
