40M meals per year: Inside the kitchen that feeds CCSD’s students

In a city known for endless buffets and high-end dining, one of Las Vegas’ largest kitchens is rarely open to guests and only caters to kids.

It’s in the far northeast valley, where workers at the Clark County School District’s Central Kitchen prepare, package and ship daily meals for the district’s 277,000 students. Just last school year, the district served over 40 million breakfasts, lunches and dinners, averaging 238,000 meals served per day.

“It’s a huge collaborative effort,” said Jake Yarberry, a school district menu planner. “It takes a huge team to get these meals out to students.”

As many as 121 workers prepare every meal that is served to elementary school students in the Central Kitchen. For middle and high schoolers, the Central Kitchen distributes the ingredients for cafeteria workers cook with. These meals, with ingredients typically sourced from California, have been free to all students since the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020.

“School meals have been recognized as some of the most nutritious meals that kids get all day long,” Yarberry said. “A lot of people pack their kids’ meals, just not thinking that this is as good or made lovingly.”

Inside the kitchen, workers keep conveyor belts filled with food running. Containers of chopped carrots and broccoli zip through inspection stations to make sure inedible objects aren’t being served to students, and cinnamon rolls spin on platforms in tall, multi-rack ovens to bake evenly.

The kitchen’s footprint is relatively small compared with the building’s warehouse and freezer space, which take up 225,000 square feet. Here, workers on forklifts haul wooden pallets stacked with food into giant freezers for storage or onto semi-trucks for distribution.

Once semis are loaded with food, the department’s 50 truck drivers follow 37 routes to deliver food to 355 school cafeterias across Clark County.

Special menu creations

While making and moving millions of meals each year is a monumental effort, deciding menu options for some of the valley’s pickiest eaters is no small feat, either.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture sets strict standards for any given meal’s nutritional value and calorie count, Yarberry said, and each year’s menus have to be submitted for review the February before a school year begins to give the department enough time to source any new ingredients and plan meal production.

Limitations like these are one reason why the school district serves meals in a four week cycle, meaning meals typically repeat on the menu once per month.

“The teriyaki bowls, if they’re on eight times the next year, and the kids eat 60,000 of them, then I’m going to have to know that I need 480,000 ordered for the next year,” Yarberry said. “If I get that number wrong and I ordered too light, then that causes issues, or if I order too heavy, then all the guys in the freezer space get angry at me.”

Some students have special dietary needs, whether it’s a gluten allergy or a disability that makes it more difficult to chew or swallow food. For roughly 650 students, school district dietitian Lory Flanagan crafts special menus for each student based on doctor’s orders.

To keep up with what school cafeterias are cooking, every school’s menu for the year is listed online at menu.ccsd.net. Users can give feedback on individual menu items by clicking on the item and dragging a sliding bar that rates it from 0 to 100.

Flanagan said the school district is responsive to these ratings. She recalled the hurdles she jumped through to get fish tacos included on one year’s menu after a conference inspired her to try bringing the meal to Clark County students.

“We had to get a vendor for the tortilla, we had to get a vendor for the fish, we had to get a vendor for the mango salsa,” Flanagan said. “When all was said and done, it took probably two or three years — and then the students didn’t like them.”

Although meal variations are limited to control inventory space, Flanagan and Yarberry said the holiday season gives the school district a chance to feed students something new.

As workers attended to their stations, the sound of metallic clanking from a hopper pumping out portions of mashed potatoes played a steady rhythm. The starchy Thanksgiving staple is part of the school district’s pre-holiday break menu, which this year also featured popcorn chicken, an assortment of vegetables and a cookie.

“There’s some students that depend on the meals that we serve,” Flanagan said, “so we wanted to make sure if they weren’t getting a holiday meal at home, they would be provided at school.”

Contact Spencer Levering at slevering@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0253.