ScratchWorks Blog, March 2025
By Abby de Riel
We sat down with Bertrand Weber, Director of Culinary and Wellness Services for Minneapolis Public Schools, whose career spans more than 35 years of combined management experience in the hospitality industry and school food service. He initiated one of Minnesota’s first Farm to School programs, brought salad bars back to Minneapolis’ public schools, and spearheaded the creation of the Ingredient Guide in 2014 with six other school districts, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and the nonprofit School Food Focus. Bertrand Weber is also a 2025 FAME Award Winner for the Golden Foodservice Director of the Year Award, announced by Basic American FoodsTM in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The Ingredient Guide is a resource for school nutrition professionals and manufacturers committed to improving the overall quality, nutritional value, and safety of food provided to all students in every school, with information on unwanted ingredients to eliminate and those to watch out for as new food products are developed and others are modified. The Ingredient Guide inspired the Life Time Foundation, a founding ScratchWorks organization, to create Green Onion: a free online tool for school nutrition professionals and purchasing cooperatives to analyze their products for ingredients of concern.
A member of Wellness in the Schools, a founding ScratchWorks organization, interviewed Bertrand Weber to learn about these school food resources.
ScratchWorks is supported thanks to generous funding from the From Now On Fund, Life Time Foundation, Newman’s Own Foundation, Wellness in the Schools, and Whole Kids Foundation.
Tell us a little about yourself. Where did your background in school food begin?
I started in the hospitality industry, but my school food journey began in the early 2000s. When my middle son was 7, he was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. I started to spend time in his classroom and lunchroom and what I saw on his plate wasn’t what I wanted to see. I became passionate about wanting to make changes in how we feed our kids. In 2003, I started working in the Hopkins School District in the suburbs of Minneapolis. I then worked for a regional management company, Taher, Inc. as the Director of Wellness, Nutrition, and Culinary Standards for a few years, where I was working on several procurement initiatives that caught the Mayor’s eye. He also staffed Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) so when the position of Director of Culinary and Wellness Services opened in 2012, he recommended me for the job.
What are some of the unique opportunities you have working at Minneapolis Public Schools?
Just like other school districts across the country, MPS participates in the USDA’s school food programs: lunch, breakfast, afterschool, and summer feeding, working with many community partners. But I’m most proud of the unique initiatives we’re working on now. We just got a grant to focus on bringing more indigenous foods to our menu in partnership with Sean Sherman, also known as “The Sioux Chef.” It’s an exciting new venture and aligns with our values to bring students more local and seasonal ingredients. I’m excited every school day to work on these kinds of opportunities.
While the next year brings a lot of uncertainty around the future of school food and government funding, our commitment to scratch cooking at MPS is something I know will stay on track. Our mission will always be to expand culturally diverse recipes representing all students and cultures, likewise exposing every student to different cultures and cuisines. Even with a lot of turnover at a high level in the district, administrators recognize the impact of food service in this district and honor all of our workers and initiatives.
Minneapolis Public Schools is a founding school district of ScratchWorks. How did you get involved in the conversation, and what interests you in continuing to be a part of this national collective?
Over the years at MPS, I connected with many other school food operators and organizations and was an Advisory Board Member of the Chef Ann Foundation, a founding ScratchWorks organization. When the ScratchWorks initiative began in 2019, I was invited to attend the initial meeting and loved the brainstorming process. It was such an organic combination between the people I knew and the organizations I stood behind. We planted the seed of creating a conference for districts that were doing scratch cooking that didn’t involve any industry members — and thus the planning for the Inaugural ScratchWorks Gathering kicked off. All of the work ScratchWorks is now doing as a collective is what I’m passionate about doing every day in MPS.
When it comes to procurement, what factors are important when trying to increase the amount of scratch cooking in Minneapolis Public Schools?
Under the Farm to School program, we’re contracting with around 18 different farms this year. It’s a main focus of ours to support local farms so that we can bring seasonal, fresh ingredients to our schools that can be scratch-cooked into delicious meals. One of the initiatives created at MPS is “Minnesota Thursdays,” where the entire lunch menu is locally sourced with recipes that represent the cultures of our student population. Every month is different and we get to show students the food growing around them. We’re also expanding our central processing facility where we take in food from farms, process it, and distribute it to schools, making it more efficient for schools to cook from scratch. Better food processing will help us be able to accept more food from local farms.
We face challenges all of the time with procurement, but I don’t see them as problems. You’re going to face ongoing challenges with the USDA, local procurement, and district procurement rules, but nothing creates permanent roadblocks to our procurement initiatives. Our biggest stressor as a district is staffing, which can sometimes affect our menu offerings when there aren’t enough staff in a school kitchen. Still, our staffing is starting to return to normal, and new USDA regulations have helped make local procurement easier and more favorable — so I’m remaining hopeful about scratch cooking initiatives nationally.
How have you seen procurement change over the last few years?
Local procurement is actually the one thing that stayed constant during the pandemic. The supply chain issues happening at a global level didn’t impact MPS as much because of our strong commitment to local farmers — we followed through with our contracts to utilize local products from farms throughout the pandemic, and we continue to! Of course, we had to make small tweaks during those years; instead of serving a pound of carrots on the line, we were packaging a pound of carrots into produce boxes for weekly distributions to families.
Focusing on local procurement has proved to be one of our greatest assets. We’ve been participating in the Farm to School program for 12 years and make small tweaks year to year. If anything, our change over time is increasing the number of local farms we work with. I was just having a conversation with our Farm to School coordinator about how we can better help small, emerging local farmers enter the commercial/industrial world by providing food for schools. It’s a win-win for everyone!
How did the Ingredient Guide begin and what was your “why” for supporting other school districts?
The brainstorming behind the Ingredient Guide began in 2013. School Food Focus, a national nonprofit working on procurement change before it was a big conversation, brought together MPS and several urban districts to create ingredient standards. At the time, we were talking about the antibiotics in poultry products and developed ingredient standards that worked their way through the USDA and effected change on some products like unseasoned chicken. It was a big win and we were very hopeful.
In our cohort of Midwest schools, we wanted to create clean-label meats so that schools could have better products to serve students. We reached out to manufacturers who then turned back to us to define the term “clean-label.” So, the Ingredient Guide was born specifically for manufacturers and the products were successfully developed. They are now available to districts nationally. After this process worked in the Midwest, we thought, why not create a national guide?
At the 2016 School Nutrition Association Food Show, School Food Focus released the national Ingredient Guide with the Center for Science in the Public Interest and seven school districts. It has been exciting to be involved since the start of something. Over time its operations have changed; Life Time Foundation volunteered to become the facilitator of the Ingredient Guide, but it still isn’t owned by anyone and is instead operated by committee members who span dozens of school districts.
My interest has always been to get better food for schools within a budget that schools can afford, and to be able to work with manufacturers to develop food with food ingredients so schools that don’t have as much capacity to cook from scratch can still feed their students well. Just because a school can’t cook from scratch — maybe the school doesn’t have a kitchen or it’s not fully operational — doesn’t mean students should not be fed well. School food operators should support each other because we collectively are working for the health of this country’s students. I’m thinking about my son with diabetes. Knowing that eliminating certain ingredients from the food system could help my son, I know it could help other students too. This is why I do what I do.
How do you partner with contributors to update the guide, and how do new ingredients of concern get added to the list?
Committee members meet quarterly, and our updates are a group effort. Several nonprofits have endorsed the Ingredient Guide and school districts have signed on who all have a voice. The Center for Science in the Public Interest brings to the table scientific research on new chemicals of concern, and committee members share ingredients they’ve seen popping up on products in the procurement system. This could be an ingredient that’s a potential carcinogen or allergen, or a new name for an added sugar that’s listed on product labels. We also focus on public health issues and have recently added warnings for items like single-use plastics. It’s based on this emerging research and science that the guide is updated on an annual basis.
What are your recommendations to school districts coming to this guide for the first time?
The Ingredient Guide is a tool school districts can use to identify better products and ultimately better food for students, no matter where they are on the scratch-cooking continuum and no matter how much experience they have with researching ingredients of products on their procurement list. The Ingredient Guide is broken into an “Unwanted List” of ingredients that should be eliminated as soon as possible and a “Watch List” of ingredients that have the potential to be overused. The Unwanted List includes artificial colors (synthetic food dyes, caramel color, and titanium dioxide), artificial and unspecified natural flavors, artificial preservatives (BHA, BHT, TBHQ, and propyl gallate), artificial sweeteners and other sugar-free substitutes, emulsifiers (CMC, brominated vegetable oil, and polysorbates), and flour treatment agents (ADA, bromated flour, and potassium iodate).
A list like that might seem overwhelming at the start. Thanks to the Life Time Foundation which created Green Onion based on the Ingredient Guide, much of the time needed to research individual ingredients and products has been taken away. Green Onion can align with any school district’s standards and supports a district in making and keeping an updated procurement document. It will also support the district’s conversations with brokers and manufacturers; districts can share their standards for ingredient procurement and advocate that manufacturers need to provide a product that fits their needs to keep their business.
Lastly, I would just say that none of this is intuitive. But if you know one thing, it’s better to start somewhere than never start at all. Our students deserve it.