Aug. 15, 2007

Starting something cool

Equipment arrives, signaling beginning of conversion

to tastier, more nutritious, safer food for recipients

 

The first sign of a new era in Friendship Trays operations appeared in the Distribution Street kitchen on Aug. 9.

When installers quit for the day, the insulated walls were in place for a “blast chiller” where freshly cooked food will be quickly cooled to 37 degrees.

When equipment and training and procedures are all in place, recipients will receive chilled food where they now receive hot.

At an Aug. 7 meeting with staff, Executive Director Lucy Bush Carter said the results of the conversion will be “such a plus for the people we are serving. The food is going to look better. It is going to taste better. It’s going to be healthier. It’s going to be safer.”

Plans for the conversion began more than a year ago. Donations are still being solicited to cover the costs. As the conversion is made, Carter believes it will have some impact on nearly everyone who makes Friendship Trays possible.

The transition

Carter says she is not ready to publish a list of when individual routes will move from hot meals to chilled.

The first routes to convert, however, will be those that volunteers pick up from the Levine Senior Center in Matthews. Today, those meals leave the South End kitchen around 9:30 a.m. in insulated bags. When the conversion occurs, the formerly hot trays will travel in coolers, then be transferred to refrigerators at Levine. After logistical issues are worked out with staff, volunteers and health inspectors, routes elsewhere will be converted.

Impact on volunteers

While the change will affect recipients the most, volunteer drivers will see a change as well. Carter is not certain yet how the logistics will work, but believes distribution of meals to drivers could change.

Today, a driver enters the Friendship Trays lobby and pulls a large brown bag out of a walk-in refrigerator. In the bag are Styrofoam containers usually containing cold dessert, bread and salad. The bag also contains a route sheet listing the recipients to be served.

The driver takes the route sheet to a distributor, who pulls trays of hot food out of a holding oven. Those hot trays vary by recipients’ dietary needs, and are placed in an insulated bag or container so they remain hot. The driver then collects the juice and milk boxes called for on the route sheet, then drives away.

Friendship Trays staff and board members volunteered for a day in Atlanta’s meals-on-wheels program earlier this year. Atlanta prepares more than 4,000 chilled meals daily. What the Charlotte contingent saw represented a slightly more streamlined system.

“When drivers arrived,” Carter recalled, “they went into the walk-in and they got a pizza-type bag that had all the food in it, and walked out.”

Carter says the Atlanta system influenced the way Friendship Trays set up operations at the Levine Center. Drivers picking up routes today at Levine pick up two bags – one hot, one cold.

Will all Friendship Trays drivers soon just pick up one chilled bag already sorted to serve recipients on the route? Eventually it may be most efficient, Carter says, for the kitchen volunteers to place the correct chilled trays and Styrofoam boxes together in a single insulated bag for each route. For volunteer drivers on lunch hour, the conversion could save some precious minutes.

Carter says Friendship Trays will not immediately convert to the single-bag system, both to accommodate individual drivers’ preferences for particular delivery containers, and to avoid a large investment in new bags.

After conversion to chilled meals, volunteers may find that a few recipients need a bit more help. “If the recipient is not going to be able to heat the meal up, that’s another opportunity for the volunteer to go in and spend another couple of minutes with them,” Carter said.

Kitchen routine to change

Since chilled food stays fresh about five days, food delivered on a Wednesday, say, may be cooked on Tuesday. That timetable would allow kitchen staff and volunteers to package food in the afternoons or even evenings. People calling to volunteer often ask about volunteering at those times. But today, little is going on at Friendship Trays during those hours. Today, food that’s delivered hot is cooked, packaged and sent out with drivers in one continuous frenzy of activity that starts at 6:30 a.m. and ends about 12:30 p.m. each weekday.

During the transition, Carter told staff, it may be wise to keep menus simple as the kitchen produces both hot meals and chilled.

“Once we get switched over,” said Kitchen Manager Sibyl Durant, “our days won’t be as pushed and pressed, because we’ll be a day or two ahead.”

To make all those changes will take a team effort, Carter told staff. “Part of what we need to do is get out of the box and think of it differently. It’s going to take all of us to make it work.”

Some will stay hot

A growing number of Friendship Trays recipients receive their trays at adult day care centers. Those meals will continue to be delivered hot, in accordance with state regulations.

For staff and volunteers in the kitchen, that means continuing to produce hot meals each morning. Carter said she did not know how many meals-on-wheels programs use both production methods in tandem. Atlanta, with more than 4,000 recipients daily, delivers all meals chilled.

Fewer dietary plans

As the kitchen alters cooking procedures, Carter said Friendship Trays would also be reducing the number of diets being prepared. Recently, there have been as many as 11 diets in use. Carter said the number would be reduced to more like five or six, while continuing to meet all recipients’ medical requirements. In the past, she said, several diets have tended to require identical foods. The trend, she said, is toward fewer diets:

“It used to be that you tried to prevent a diabetic from having something with refined sugar in it. Now it’s a whole lot more of a balancing act of carbohydrates: Give them a piece of cake, but balance it out by the kinds of foods that you serve that have the complex carbohydrates in them.

“We want to have variety and taste,” Carter told staff. “We don’t want it to be so bland that everybody could have it. We’re serving older people whose taste buds are failing. You’ve got to give them something that’s going to taste good. To somebody 90, it’s the cake.”

“It would be for me,” quipped Assistant Director Donna Thrasher.

Fewer individualized trays

Recipients regularly let Friendship Trays know what they like, and dislike, among the foods that cycle through the daily menus. And that feedback will continue to be welcomed.

Friendship Trays staff, who eat leftovers from the morning line for lunch, have their likes and dislikes too. Kitchen Manager Sibyl Durant’s least-favorite vegetable, for example, is diced beets.

At the Aug. 7 meeting, there were jokes about diced beets, and even a vow never to serve the diced beets again. “We’re going to say sliced Harvard or sliced glazed – and only once a month.” Durant said drolly. There was general approval, however, of beet salad that dilutes the diced beets with onions, diced pepper, vinegar and sweetener.

“Do you have brussels sprouts on the list, too?” Office Manager Frandetta Barnes asked.

Over the years, Friendship Trays has tried to meet individual recipients’ food preferences. Some recipients ask never to be served turnip greens, for example. Thrasher said “no pork” and “no fish” requests would continue to be honored. What about recipients who, like Durant, can’t stand beets? Henceforth, they may simply be reminded that they don’t have to eat all they are served.

Amid change, same mission

Carter believes the changes about to occur represent the biggest shift in how Friendship Trays operates since it was founded in 1976. Yet the core mission remains exactly the same.

“We’re doing a very basic, important thing – feeding people who can’t do that for themselves. We’re checking on people who might be at risk of falls and all sorts of other things. It’s important to families. It’s important to the community.”