[Maggie Mae Kennedy] We are a mid-size school district in the Houston area. We have 42 sites. We serve about 27,000 lunches a day operating out of each individual kitchen. We don't have any satellites. We have an enrollment of 32,000 kids.
[Susan D’Amico] If you fly into Houston and you go to Intercontinental Airport, you're in my district. We have 82 kitchens, 80 are sites where we serve kids. We have 58,000 kids and we are high free and reduced, about 92%.
[Dagmara Gujda] Katy ISD's Mission statement is to promote healthy eating and provide nutritious meals to all students, teachers, staff and visiting patrons of the district. We currently have 75 campuses and 82 kitchens for an enrollment of over 96,000 students. ANC is a fantastic conference. It's a great opportunity to learn new things, share ideas. It's wonderful to see that there are other school districts nationwide and not just locally in our state that are doing the same things. We're all here for the children. We're here to promote healthy meals and nutrition for our students, nutrition education.
[Susan D’Amico] I'm at conference because I'm going to be on a panel later for discussion about innovations in food service. Automation is so important because it saves on labor. The other thing is accountability. When it comes to cost control, you have all kinds of features in an automated system that can control how much you're ordering, how much you're wasting, also can control your revenue.
[Dagmara Gujda] Automation helps you communicate on a faster pace with your staff and with administrators or with parents. If there are changes, you have the opportunity with any kind of automated system to update things immediately instead of waiting as it used to be in the olden days—to print, to copy, to write. It helps you make sure your program is compliant. It helps you track consistency on all levels, whether it's from menu planning, to production planning to creating orders, to taking temperatures to monitoring your critical control points.
[Maggie Mae Kennedy] We have so many things going on in the kitchen on a daily basis that it's one less thing the manager has to worry about. Now they can worry about food presentation, food quality, customer service, making sure their team supported. Because we know that we have automation systems that have our back. We use SmartSense and we use it for freezers, coolers, and for our digital thermometers. We no longer have to deal with paper records when the health department comes in and wants to see what's going on with us, we can just pull it up on a platform.
[Dagmara Gujda] It has been a wonderful addition to our kitchens. Managers are very excited to use it. It has made things a lot easier to track the critical control points and temperatures of the foods that we serve, whether hot or cold. Better way of tracking food quality to make sure that we're serving the food as the vendor and the manufacturer intended it to be served.
[Susan D’Amico] I hesitated for about a year because I was worried about compliance. My thinking was if something was out of temp and they recorded it, then it would be forever recorded and that scared me. But I actually ended up being pleasantly surprised by how well my employees embraced it and how it actually improved processes because it held them accountable. The best part of it is that I can look at any time and make sure that I have food safety occurring in all my kitchens.
[Dagmara Gujda] And SmartSense allows us to see which employees are taking temperatures on a regular basis. And to make sure that they are responsible for the areas in the kitchen, whether they're serving or prepping or cooking the foods, that all the temperatures are being taken, all of the flow with food cycles are being followed. It's a wonderful piece of equipment and program to use, especially when we have the health department visiting us, we're able to print out the reports and show the health department what foods were in compliance, what times we took the temperatures. we.
[Maggie Mae Kennedy] We are in a time of change right now everywhere in the world. So, in K-12 with enrollment budgets and policy, it heavily affects child nutrition. They just released the final rule. And so we're having to cut back on sugar, you know, sodium levels. And one less thing that we now have to worry about is using automation.
[Susan D’Amico] I had mapped out all kinds of time for us for training, for retraining, that was not necessary. We put the entire department, at that point we had 84 kitchens, put them all up at one time. So that was a lot of people at once. But it was so simple and easy that we went up without a hitch all in a day. We had a couple retrainings for a couple days. That was it. By the first week, we were fully functional. It's much more effective and easier than I ever dreamed.
