New Haven Independent

The “Food Dude,” as he’s known on Channel 3, is Tim Cipriano. He’s also the new in-house food services chief for the Board of Ed. He replaced a private outside company, Aramark, which ran the kitchens until running into a labor controversy.

The Board’s Administration and Finance Committee this week celebrated several recent food technology advances to help Cipriaino — pictured with pineapple-colored tie — to transition to the post-Aramark era of self-operation.

For starters, the overly icy and energy-draining freezer at the BOE’s central kitchen, which will be storing many of the Food Dude’s fresh gastronomic surprises for the system’s kids, will, after nearly five years of trouble, be re-designed for the beginning of the school year. Fifty thousand dollars of withheld costs will pay for the repairs, including new doors which will open and close in seconds, and thus cut down on the rampant humidity. Other upgrades will save energy in the future.

“Those doors,” said Tom Smith, the construction manager in charge for the BOE, “are going to be like equipment on Star Trek. They’ll open and close in seconds instead of staying open for long periods, while workers unload supplies on the dock.”

Right now, the extreme cold of the freezer collides with humid air from the street and, to use the phrase of BOE’s chief operating officer Will Clark (pictured below), “It will cease to be like a colliding rainstorm in there.”

Perhaps an even more far reaching change is a contract with Horizon Software International, of Duluth, Georgia, approved by the committee Monday, to bring in a touch screen computer system to replace cash registers at all 53 school cafeteria locations.

“This is one-stop technology,” said Will Clark, “that will do everything from track student lunch forms, to inventory and purchasing control, to menu creation. Eventually Tim will be able to put in ‘chicken Florentine,’ and the system will tell him precisely in what quantity and from what source to purchase, at bet cost, all the ingredients.”

For starters, however, Clark expressed confidence that by the fall start of school, the screens would be at each school and replace cash exchanges when kids buy additional items beyond the universal free lunch. “And it has all kinds of interesting features also to protect the health of kids.”

He was referring, for example, to a feature by which, when a kid gives his student ID number (which is tracked for reimbursement purposes for the free lunch), if he has an allergy, say to milk, the cashier will be alerted and not be able to sell him milk.

“That’s all predicated,” said Clark, “on our downloading student information, if parents provide it, from the student database into the new food system. We’ll do it all in time.”

Cipriano, who is familiar with the software, termed it the best system out there.

Clark said that with Cipriano on the job only three weeks, the whole system, particularly the workers at the Central Kitchen, have been stepping up and helping to transition to a new self-operating system. Clark said that Aramark initially introduced the Horizon software, but that it was operating only in ten schools and it wasn’t integrated as it will be in the new vision of the Food Dude.

Clark and Cipriano also showed for the committee’s approval their first successful foray into purchasing milk by the gazillions of quarts. The low bidder for the system’s milk contract for the coming year was Marcus Dairy, of Danbury, and the committee approved expenditures of the cow juice, in various forms, up to $1,114,955.

Clark said it is unlikely the system will spend that much. The promising news is that the per unit cost negotiated by the BOE was less than Aramark’s, a sign of good things to come.

In all of this, had the Food Dude, in his first three weeks on the job, had any time to cook up pizza with beets or other promised treats?

In his quiet genial manner he said, “No time for cooking yet. But all in good time.”