July 20, 2022 — Our Schwan’s Food Service team recently celebrated the opportunity to attend the School Nutrition Association’s Annual National Conference in Orlando, Florida. It’s the first time employees attended the event since the start of the pandemic.
“Given the challenges that school nutrition departments across the country faced over the past two years, attending ANC was more important than ever as it allowed us an opportunity to show Schwan’s commitment and truly reconnect with food-service operators in a meaningful way, in-person,” said Amy Bunch, senior marketing director for Schwan’s Food Service.
Known as the school nutrition event of the year, the School Nutrition Association’s Annual National Conference (ANC) unites thousands of school nutrition program operators, industry partners and allied organizations for an educational and networking experience. This year’s event included more than 120 education sessions, 800 exhibit booths and several networking events. The event was attended by more than 3,000 School Nutrition Association food-service operators.
Featured foods and demonstrations
Our Schwan’s Food Service team’s booth included breakfast, Asian-food, pizza and solution stations. Chef Jet Tila, Chef Craig Claude and Chef Deb Hey were also on site to showcase Food Service’s products during live culinary demonstrations.
At the conference, Chef Jet hosted a special culinary demonstration where he shared a brief history and background on the evolution of dumplings and spoke to the growth in popularity of dumplings — especially in K12 schools. The recipes he featured during the demonstrations included Mandarin Orange Dumplings and Spicy Szechwan Dumplings. The products in these recipes include Chef One™ Whole Wheat Chicken and Vegetable Dumplings, Minh® Whole Grain Vegetable Fried Rice, Minh Low Sodium Sauces and the Minh Orange Chicken Kit. The event was well received with the room at maximum capacity.
The team also featured its new Tony’s™ Breakfast Bagels, Big Daddy’s™ Cheese Stuffed Sandwich and Big Daddy’s Fiestada® Beef Stuffed Sandwich, which deliver on the rising demand of handheld products that are operator friendly, as they are easy to prepare and serve to students on the go.
The pizza station featured Big Daddy’s Primo 16-inch Whole Grain Rising Crust Buffalo Chicken Pizza and Tony’s Individually Wrapped 5-inch 51 percent Whole Grain Turkey Pepperoni Pizza in the new branded Tony’s packaging.
Our team also had a solution station that served as an additional area for booth guests to speak one-on-one with our team members about commodity planning and The Kitchen Circle Program, which allows operators to collect points to use toward equipment for their lunchrooms.
