Known as the “School Nutrition Event of the Year,” the School Nutrition Association’s Annual National Conference was held July 9-12 in Atlanta. The conference united more than 6,000 attendees from school nutrition, industry and allied organizations. This year, the Potatoes USA team brought the heat with a very successful potato-packed booth. The team featured daily fresh baked breakfast potato dishes, highlighting the versatility and deliciousness of using potato dishes on school menus. Educational materials and fun, potato-centric giveaways kept the booth busy all conference long, with over 600 new school foodservice operator contacts generated. The three top takeaways from the event are:
- Baked potato bars are fun for kids, but need more creative inspiration for toppings. The most requested information from school foodservice professionals at the conference was the salad bar schematics that provided diagrams of how to include potatoes on a salad bar and create fun, exciting potato bars. This thrilled operators to no end, and Potatoes USA plans to expand on this concept for fiscal year 2018.
- School food professionals need continuing education units (CEUs), but it’s hard to participate in live educational events with such a hectic schedule. The new four-part “Potatoes Raise the Bar” video series, available at SchoolPotatoTraining, was running on a big-screen TV in the Potatoes USA booth at the conference. These videos not only provide a CEU; they are a great training tool for kitchen staff learning to get creative with potatoes and students learning agriculture in the classroom.
- Potato training materials were of high interest, but there was only so much attendees could take home with them on the plane. Therefore, all the information provided at the booth is also located on PotatoGoodness, and the school professionals were glad to learn that all this potato information is readily available to them.