After nearly three months of widespread industry discussion, input and questions, the full membership of the United States Potato Board (USPB) unanimously supported the use of up to $900,000 in USPB reserve funds to match salad bars donated by the industry in Year 1 of the Salad Bar Challenge, beginning July 1, 2015.
“This is a win for all parties involved in that we are helping teach young people what to eat to be healthy,” said newly-elected USPB Domestic Marketing Committee co-chair John Halverson of Black Gold Farms in Charleston, Mo. “With the USPB’s participation in the program, we will also have a platform to tout potatoes’ health benefits by working with nutritionists and others responsible for school lunchrooms every day.
“This is an opportunity to tell the story of the healthy potato to school-aged kids, and by doing so, we’re creating eating habits that are healthy and include potatoes. Hopefully in the long run, this will increase potato consumption and improve the image of the potato.”
The proof of concept for “potato-friendly” salad bars is currently in a testing phase. The Colorado Potato Administrative Committee worked with the USPB in late 2014 to place two salad bars into one Denver-area school district. The district now has salad bars in nine of its 16 schools. Results from this experiment will be made known to the potato industry at the USPB’s 2015 Summer Meeting in August.
We will learn a lot between now and then. We will report back after we’ve had a chance to learn and determine how to make this work, and we will be a lot smarter by August. We don’t have all the answers yet because this is new and untried.
Funding the Salad Bar Challenge with $1.3 million in the USPB budget does not mean the money will be automatically spent. The staff and USPB members will be good stewards on behalf of the industry and will sensibly commit limited USPB financial resources toward research and testing.
In further business, the Board also instructed USPB Marketing Department staff to utilize $400,000 from the Domestic Marketing budget to support the salad bars in schools. The funds are to be used to provide recipes, serving suggestions, decorations and other materials to schools throughout the country that have or will receive the salad bars to help them incorporate healthy potato items into the bars. To accomplish this objective, the USPB will be issuing a Request for Proposals (RFP) for consultants or agencies that can work with the staff to develop the messages, recipes and materials.
For the U.S. potato industry to realize the full potential of this program and what it can achieve by putting healthy potato dishes in front of schoolchildren (as well as improving the positive image of potatoes with this key group of influencers and future consumer decision makers), it is absolutely critical all sectors of the industry—from input suppliers and manufacturers, all the way through to the marketing chain—step up and donate at least 300 salad bars this summer that can be immediately put into use this fall for the beginning of the 2015-16 school year.