Decatur Township Schools Boost Meal Service with Alto-Shaam Combi Ovens

Feeding the hordes of hungry students in a busy school district is no small task, and few people understand that better than Nicole Moorhead, Child Nutrition Director for the MSD of Decatur Township in Indianapolis, Ind. “We serve about 6,000 students across 11 schools,” Moorhead says. “Our team serves thousands of meals every day — breakfast, lunch and after school snacks. We’re busy, but we love what we do.”

To produce high-volume food quickly and efficiently, the Decatur Township kitchens have turned to combi ovens — specifically, Alto-Shaam combi ovens. “We use our Alto-Shaam combis for just about everything — baking, roasting, steaming, retherming, you name it. They’re super-versatile and make it easy to prepare meals in bulk while still getting great quality,” she says. “It’s very rare that we have to lean on existing convection ovens.”

Her front-line kitchen crews have found the combi ovens help them do their jobs better. “They love them. They save us a ton of time and effort,” says Moorhead. “We can cook multiple items at once without worrying about flavor transfer.” And the ovens help produce lots of food consistently, she adds, saying the ovens “keep things moving, especially when we’re prepping for hundreds or thousands of meals. The consistency is a huge win.”

Smooth Operation

If kitchen staff finds a piece of equipment difficult to learn or operate, it’s not going to be used to its full capacity. That’s no problem with the Alto-Shaam combi ovens, Moorhead says. “The tech is easy to understand; even newer staff catch on quickly. And it helps take the stress out of high-volume cooking.” Chef Vlad Bora, from her Alto-Shaam dealer’s rep, Allied Technologies of Greenwood, Ind., has been “amazing,” she says, in providing training and support. He came to train some of Moorhead’s kitchen managers, showing them basic recipes and working on some new recipes. It was a brief learning curve, she says, and now they’ve trained other staff on it as well. “I’ve never had to go out and retrain anyone,” says Moorhead.

The flexibility of the Alto-Shaam combi ovens means that individual schools (with their individual cooks) can prepare dishes exactly the way they like them. “Everybody cooks things differently, even in my own school. They make their own recipes. Pizza at one place is different than at the building next door,” she says. With the combi ovens, “they just input and make their recipes on their own with Alto-Shaam.”

Moorhead calls the decision to go with Alto-Shaam “a no-brainer. They’re reliable, user-friendly and hold up really well over time. We had one that we finally retired after 20 years — you can’t beat that reliability.” The same cook had been using that oven for those entire 20 years and when it was retired, the handle was removed and mounted on a plaque as a gift for her. “They literally had to grieve when that oven was leaving,” she laughs, “but once they saw the brand new one come in, they’re like – OK, this is nice!”