Why Kid Chow

Why Kid Chow?

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Why Kid Chow

At Kid Chow, food has always been our passion and providing kids healthy, delicious local food continues to be our mission. There is a story behind every lunch we serve. Whether it’s the inspiration behind our recipes, the months of testing pasta shapes, cheese flavors and scratch recipes in our kitchen or the recipe tweaking after the kid taste panels have weighed in, we make sure that any meal on Kid Chow’s menu has earned its place to be there!

As we near a decade of service to Bay Area school students, Kid Chow remains a small family owned business focused solely on Bay area schools and camps. While some of our competitors have national aspirations or have expanded to other geographies, we remain committed to personally connecting with each of our school communities and offering organic and local products in a sustainably responsible way. By personally, we mean Rob and Jamie Feuerman, Kid Chow founders, not sales and marketing teams, know every school director, PTA Lunch Committee member and food supplier we conduct business with.

Schools and PTA’s across the Bay Area are assessing their current lunch programs and evaluating their options. It’s a difficult challenge, distinguishing among the various lunch providers, especially when we all start sounding the same, using the same buzz words (local, sustainable, healthy.) We also know that larger companies use their resources to create elegant marketing messages, snazzy websites and twitter groupies. That’s not our style. At Kid Chow, we’ve kept our eyes on the prize – the yummiest food possible, lunch personalization (aka true choice) and outstanding customer service.

The best advice we can offer you in evaluating the various school lunch providers for your own school community is to dig deeper than website content and commentary from account managers to determine what you really get regarding menu selection, food taste, customer references and value. Do an unannounced site visit to a participating school and see for yourself whether the students are enjoying the food. Most school directors will allow you to visit upon request. Watch how many kids are bringing food from home vs. buying school lunch. Look at the food and the packaging. Ask the kids what they think. Anyone can sell a lunch program to a school community; it’s another thing to keep that community happy year in and year out. We know; we are proudly serving graduating 8th graders who we’ve been feeding since Kindergarten!

We hope you consider us when you are assessing lunch programs and we invite you to visit any of our schools. We want you to see how appealing our food looks and how much the students enjoy our lunches. And by all means, call us, Rob and Jamie, if you’d like to chat about Kid Chow. We relish the opportunity to speak with you personally about our commitment to going the extra mile for kids, serving personalized healthy and tasty lunches that will inspire and empower kids to eat nutritiously. We’d be honored to partner with your school community in this vital mission. Here is what makes Kid Chow’s lunch service singularly unique.

Menu Selection

Real choice is much more than variety, it’s also personalization.

Kid Chow is a Virtual Cafeteria delivered in a Brown Lunch Bag. Kid Chow offers more daily lunch entrees than any lunch provider; over 20 per day with an even mix of hot and cold items. Each unique lunch is individually labeled by child and placed in a brown lunch bag which is also individually labeled by child. That’s right! Each child gets their own lunch bag with their specific lunch items. Hot lunches are also individually labeled but placed in a separate electric warmer for handout during lunchtime. Although that’s pretty amazing, our secret sauce lies in our ability to allow kids to customize their lunch choices. The combination of our proprietary technology (Rob’s a former software engineer) and incredible kitchen operations (Jamie’s a former caterer turned lawyer) allow children to get what they like the way they like it. It’s really hard to do and what distinguishes us from all other school lunch providers.

Customize Your Entrees

It doesn’t matter how much choice you offer if you still offer a one size fits all model. What do we mean by that? If you go to burrito shop with your kids do you order identical burritos? If so, consider yourself lucky. Truth be told, the kind of bean in a burrito (as well as cheese, rice and type of tortilla) really does matter! At Kid Chow, its build your own burrito – pick the type of tortilla (wheat, corn or flour,) and its contents: meat, rice, cheese, and bean. Our prep reports reflect that less than 50 % of kids like refried beans and 35% of kids prefer to have no cheese on their burrito. So, if a lunch provider is offering a bean and cheese burrito with refried beans, odds are high that more than 50% of your kids won’t eat it. We call that virtual choice.

At Kid Chow we offer kid’s real choice. Our entire menu offers customization. You can pick the sauce on your pasta (tomato, pesto, oil, parmesan, just plain.) You can pick the type of bread for your sandwich (wheat, sourdough, white, french roll, dutch crunch). Pick your sandwich condiments (lettuce, tomato, pickles, onion, cheese, mayo, ketchup, yellow mustard, dijon mustard, etc). By offering kids real choice, we guarantee that more kids in your school community will order our lunches and that they will enjoy them too. In this way, Kid Chow affords more customer satisfaction to its school communities.

Customize Your Sides

Kid Chow offers over 25 healthy side selections daily, including 7 organic seasonal fruits and veggies, dairy including cheese sticks, yogurt tubes, hard boiled eggs and fun but healthier versions of chips and treats. The difference at Kid Chow is that parents preselect these items when ordering online so kids are guaranteed to get food they like in their child’s lunch bag and parents are guaranteed that kids are eating the healthy foods they approve of too. Every other lunch provider preselects kids lunch sides as well as offers a more limited set of the lunch choices for kids.

You might ask why this is so bad, if all the food they offer is healthy. Two reasons:

Real choice versus virtual choice - Any lunch program that allows the lunch vendor to preselect sides, does not offer real choice. While it’s great for a lunch vendor to "sell” you on the idea that they offer watermelon radishes or pomelos to kids at lunch, the reality is that many kids might chose not to eat them. What good is this type of choice if it means that kids will skip their fruits and veggies that day? We truly believe that many lunch vendors are selling customers on the idea of choice but in reality providing virtual choice. Let’s face it, if your child doesn’t like either fruit or veggie choice of the day, than there really isn’t a choice for them and we’re guessing you’d like your kids to have a fruit or veggie with their lunch every day. At Kid Chow, we provide real choice to kids everyday because you, not Kid Chow, select the fruit/veggies your child likes from at least 7 organic daily options. We prefer getting the healthy fruits and veggies into your kids at lunch time and applaud you for experimenting with the watermelon radishes and pomelos at home where you have the luxury of time and conversation to share these new foods with them.
Teaching kids about healthy eating requires more than healthy food, it also requires oversight. - As parents of school age kids ourselves, we are committed to modeling and teaching them how to make healthy food choices. This, we’ve learned, is a journey that happens over time. Kids, especially K-5th graders, need our help making good food choices, at every meal. Eating a healthy school lunch, more than 170 of them each year, reinforces the healthy eating habits you practice in your home.

Unfortunately, free choice at lunch, another idea that sounds great in sales deals, in reality, falls far short of modeling or teaching healthy eating habits to kids. We’ve observed first hand the types of food choices kids make by visiting "healthy” lunch programs in action. Not surprisingly, when preselected fruits and veggies are placed next to chips and cookies, the kids nearly always take the cookie. We’ve got nothing against cookies (really, Jamie is famous for hers.) What we do know is this; cookies are not as nutritious as carrots or strawberries. Likewise, if you were present at lunch, you’d encourage your child to take the strawberries instead of the cookies. We totally get why you want that, so we let you do just that, have oversight to your child’s lunch. You preorder your child’s sides online, and we make sure they get the healthy meal you want for them and reinforce your daily message about healthy eating, or as we like to call it, "Your Values in a Bag.” As kids get older and develop the skills to make healthy food choices, it won’t be by accident; it will have been by design. Choosing the right school lunch partner is vital to that success.

Taste

Cooking food in smaller batches tastes better We’re honored each year when we are told during the sales cycle process that our food has been voted the kids’ favorite in competitive taste tests. We work tirelessly to hear those words. We’ve devoted most of our energy to the food, not fancy websites or an ever changing marketing message, because for us it is all about the food and it always will be. Kid Chow’s food tastes artisan-made because it is made in small batches, similar to how restaurants prepare your food. We offer a lot of variety too, so instead of making 2,000 orders of the same 4 hot items each day, we offer smaller batches of 12 lunch items. And, when we discover someone else making something delicious and healthy for kids that we don’t make, we partner with them and offer it on our menu too because we genuinely want to get kids jazzed about eating healthy food.

Local lunch providers’ food, some who are much bigger than Kid Chow and/or offer less choice than us, have lost their home style taste. Their websites might convey a homey feel, chat about their roots as a smaller lunch company or employ rock star sales people. None of that matters; it’s the food that matters. 4,000 of the same bean & cheese burritos taste commercialized, because they are made in a commercial manner. These burritos can’t hold a candle to the taste of Kid Chow’s artisan-made burritos, made with all the fixins your child likes. We encourage you to visit all of the lunch vendors’ schools to see firsthand the food they’re serving, not the staged tastings. Ask kids on the campus if they like the food and why. As we like to say, "the proof is in the pudding!” Kid Chow makes some mighty fine pudding.

Our Customers – Who is a Kid Chow customer?

Kid Chow has always been focused on school communities who value healthy living, sustainability, high quality food, and personalized service. In casual conversation, we describe our customer as the dedicated Trader Joes/Whole Foods/Farmer’s market shopper who dabbles in CostCo. Kid Chow serves a prestigious list of recognized private schools as well as public schools in the Tiburon, Orinda and Los Altos School districts. We have maintained continuous relationships with almost every school we have ever served. The primary reasons for our successful tenure is the combination of our deep partnerships with school communities combined with our program’s incomparable value. Not to mention that Kid Chow’s incredible food variety, combined with customization, avoids that inevitable and dreaded vendor burnout that many of our competitors face from menu boredom. Schools don’t stay with Kid Chow that long just because they like Rob and Jamie…it’s ultimately about outstanding food and service! Please feel free to contact any of the school communities we serve as a reference, especially the ones we’ve had for 8 years and counting!

Value

We strive to give you more than what you pay for with Kid Chow! Perhaps the best compliment we have ever received was from a PTA president who told us that she couldn’t believe that we could do everything we said we could do, and do it so well. She called us, "The Real Deal.” If you can sort through all the marketing stuff, and get to what’s important -- the best tasting food, at affordable pricing with top notch customer service, we think you’ll find that Kid Chow provides the very best value in the marketplace, at prices equal to our competitors. Kid Chow is often perceived as being – high end - and we are, But our prices aren't, and that's exactly why we are the best value.

Over the years, Kid Chow has worked creatively to provide competitive pricing, despite offering a higher level of service, food quality and choice. We encourage you to make a spreadsheet comparing us to our competitors, because if you do, you will find you that we really do offer so much more for comparable pricing. In addition to all the variety, choice and personalization Kid Chow offers, we allow parents to order every week or use an automatic ordering feature that lets them order lunches for the entire school year. We also accept late orders (48 hours advance notice), late cancelations for credit and feature an Entrée a la Carte option for budget conscience parents or lighter eaters. Every year we innovate to improve our lunch program. We really care about what we do and we’d be honored to partner with your community.

Chow for now,

Rob and Jamie Feuerman
(415.830.0089/415.830.0060)