GFA Shifts to New Lunch System due to Pandemic
By Will San Jose '22 and Sam Lublinsky '22
In its efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Greens Farms Academy has begun a new lunch system of delivering individually packaged meals to students daily.
“We needed to come up with an alternative,” Assistant Head of School Victor Llanque said. “Instead of people going to the food, the food had to go to the people.”
The process of planning lunch started in late July and was finalized in August. Currently, students and faculty place their lunch orders for the next week each Wednesday. GFA’s usual food vendor, Flik Independent School Dining, relays the orders to New-Jersey-based catering company York Street Market by Friday. York Street Market produces the majority of meals that students and faculty order, while Flik provides salads and chips, and controls the distribution of meals to their respective classrooms.
Meghan Lally, GFA’s Special Events and Administrative Coordinator, was placed in charge of the lunch distribution process at the beginning of the school year.
“I’m always up for a new challenge,” Lally said. “I’m happy to pick up any extra work and help make this school year a success.”
Llanque and Lally worked together on executing the lunch plan for the first few weeks of the school year.
“We had to come up with a system where food would be delivered to people at the last period of their day before lunch,” Llanque said. “It took a lot of readjusting.”
One instance of such readjusting came in the form of the daily lunch surveys.
“We just really encourage everybody to order on the forms to ensure they’re getting exactly what they want to eat for lunch,” Lally said. “The teachers have done a really good job at encouraging students to order on time.”
Several challenges remain with the current preparation and delivery of lunch at GFA.
“The number one challenge that we faced is how do we feed people safely,” Llanque said. “That was our number one priority.”
“The biggest challenge is to ensure that everybody’s taking the correct lunch that they ordered for the week,” Lally said.
Llanque and Lally also spoke of potential improvements to the current lunch system.
“I would love to offer [a] more wide variety of food,” Lally said. “It is difficult because we do need to work with all different palates.”
“What we would like to be able to do is serve food that was made on the day it’s eaten, and that’s not the case right now,” Llanque said.