April 11, 2025
Exciting news! The NOFA-VT Farm to School team is spearheading two new projects to reimagine what’s possible in school cafeterias. This work is strategically focused on localizing a few of the products K-12 school kitchens serve most often, bakery and dairy products, or, as we’re fondly calling them, our bread and butter. For NOFA-VT, this work is a no-brainer: in a state like ours, every child deserves the delicious, nutritious bounty being baked and bottled all around us every day, our farmers deserve access to these meaningful markets, and our communities are more resilient when they’re connected.
Our hearts are warmed to share that this new project was originally inspired by Vermont’s school nutrition professionals' desire for local options for purchasing the products they use most often. Vermont’s school nutrition professional community is rich with local purchasing champions, who foremost want to do best by the students they serve every day, and see healthy, fresh, organic, and local sourcing as a big part of that goal. They also recognize the potential of their local purchasing decisions to positively influence local economies and communities.
Their dedication is made all the more remarkable when considering the barriers they face – from tight budgets to stringent nutrition requirements, K-12 buyers navigate a maze of regulations with finite resources. Bakery products, for example, must be at least 50% whole grain, must be portioned at the appropriate serving size, and must meet sodium and sugar requirements in order to meet National School Lunch Program requirements. As you might imagine, this essentially means that bakery products must be developed specifically for the K-12 market.
And that’s exactly what the NOFA-VT Farm to School team is setting out to do. Over the next two years, we’ll work with Vermont bakeries and school nutrition professionals to facilitate K-12 bakery product development, ensuring there are local options that meet child nutrition standards for the breads, buns, and muffins Vermont’s K-12 buyers serve every day as part of their school meals. We will also support participating bakeries to source local flour for these K-12 bakery products, and will support schools in incorporating Vermont-grown flour into their scratch baking programs. We are thrilled to be digging into this work, connecting Vermont’s school buyers and students with healthy, fresh, local grains, and forging connections between Vermont’s burgeoning grain growing, milling, and baking community and an eager local school market.
Alongside this work localizing the bakery products served in Vermont schools, we’re also coordinating a two-year push to get more Vermont organic dairy in our local schools across the state. Building on the success of a pilot project running for the past two years that connected several Vermont schools with local, organic Miller Farm milk, we’re now facilitating conversations between any and all interested Vermont organic dairy farmers and school buyers in their respective communities. This effort is paired with statewide outreach to school buyers to identify untapped opportunities for Vermont organic dairy products in school lunch, breakfast, and summer meal programs. In some cases, these introductions and support will be enough to spark new purchasing relationships for existing Vermont organic dairy products. We also anticipate that these initial conversations will surface demand for more K-12 dairy product development, as with our school milk pilot with Miller Farm.
This K-12 supply chain facilitation is responsive to product gaps and opportunities in K-12 local purchasing, and would not be possible without the inspiring insight and vision our school nutrition professional colleagues bring to our shared work, and the drive so many Vermont farmers and food producers have to feed their communities. The vision our Farm to School team brings to this intersection of farm and school is not one marked by compromise or sacrifice, but by mutually beneficial collaboration. We really are stronger together, and it is a privilege and a joy to serve in this connective role.
Are you a dairy or grain producer (or baker!) who wants to sell to schools in your community? Or, perhaps you’re a parent or caregiver who wants to see local “bread and butter” in your child’s school? Have questions or ideas? Contact NOFA-VT’s Farm to School Program Manager, Kayla Strom: [email protected].
For more farm to school resources, check out Vermont FEED at VTFEED.org, our farm to school partnership with Shelburne Farms.
All school cafeteria photography by Kimberly Kaufman