Better in their words…

When chef Dan Giusti left Noma — repeatedly named the world’s best restaurant — he wasn’t chasing another culinary accolade. He was chasing a belief that everyone deserves good food.

With ultraprocessed diets and chronic disease on the rise, Giusti’s company, Brigaid, is betting that trained chefs, not reheated cafeteria meals, can transform school lunch for millions of American children.

That challenge is growing increasingly urgent. More than half of the calories Americans eat come from ultraprocessed foods, and nearly 30 million students rely on school lunches every day. Those meals have become a high-stakes battleground over children’s health.

As evidence mounts of contaminants in school meals and rising chronic-disease risks in children, parents, lawmakers and states are pushing to overhaul what kids eat at school.

But at home, millions of families still struggle to eat well. A Pew Research Center survey found that many adults often choose taste over nutrition, can’t find or afford fresh ingredients, or simply don’t know what healthy eating actually looks like anymore.

Those gaps put even more pressure on schools — and on the people trying to change what ends up on kids’ trays.

Giusti founded Brigaid in 2016 to help close that gap. He left fine dining to build a team of chefs willing to trade restaurant prestige for the challenge of bringing real culinary skill into public institutions — from schools to hospitals, prisons and assisted-living facilities — and replace heat-and-serve meals with scratch cooking.

As one of the few for-profit companies in a field dominated by nonprofits, Brigaid finds itself in uncharted territory as it tests whether a chef-driven model can survive on institutional budgets. The toughest part, Giusti told Civil Eats, isn’t getting kids to try new foods. It’s convincing chefs to rethink what their work means.

“You’re not cooking for you. If the kids aren’t happy, nothing else matters,” he said.

Chefs aim to shift how an entire generation eats

The math is equally daunting. Public schools serving low-income communities must feed students on a federal reimbursement rate hovering around $4.62 per meal — a figure that must also cover labor, supplies and overhead. That leaves only a sliver of room for ingredients, forcing Brigaid chefs to be both creative and efficient.

Still, the approach is gaining traction. For example, in New London, Connecticut, Brigaid helped schools transition from frozen, processed meals to fully scratch-cooked menus.

One lunch included marinated pork, fried plantains and arroz con gandules with a kale Caesar salad and diced fresh watermelon, The Guardian reported. The meal met U.S. Department of Agriculture nutrition rules and cost only $2.71 in ingredients, demonstrating how far careful planning and real cooking can stretch limited budgets.

Brigaid chef Ryan Kennedy told Civil Eats he can make scratch whole-grain pizza for about 5 cents a slice, compared with 28 cents for the packaged version. A processed chicken patty runs the school 66 cents, while a scratch-roasted chicken thigh costs just 56 cents.

Brigaid chefs see this as more than menu reform. As Kennedy told Civil Eats, the goal is to shift how an entire generation eats — a mission Giusti didn’t initially set out to lead, but one that now drives the company’s evolving model.

Students grow ‘less and less healthy’ as reliance on heat-and-serve meals rises

Nearly 100,000 schools participate in the National School Lunch Program, which served over 4.8 billion lunches in the 2023-24 school year. Brigaid told The Guardian that the average child eats more than 2,000 school lunches between kindergarten and 12th grade.

Another 15.4 million students took part in the School Breakfast Program in 2023-24, compared with fewer than 1 million in 2000-01.

Critics argue that the growing reliance on school meals hasn’t improved children’s health. Dr. Meryl Nass noted that as schools began providing up to 10 meals a week, students “became less and less healthy.”

Data back up the concern: Global rates of high blood pressure in kids and teens nearly doubled over the past two decades; cases of Type 2 diabetes in adolescents doubled between 2001 and 2017, while Type 1 diabetes also increased; and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports 14.7 million U.S. youths now have obesity.

“The school lunch program has been co-opted by Big Food and has become more of a welfare program for ultraprocessed food than a program designed to raise healthier children,” Nass said.

A federal Make America Healthy Again or MAHA Commission report identified ultraprocessed foods as a major driver of the childhood chronic disease epidemic, and polls show broad bipartisan support for banning them from school meals.

Parents’ groups share those concerns. Moms Across America has tested school lunches nationwide and found that they contain heavy metals, pesticides and other toxins.

“Today, most elementary and secondary schools rely on ultraprocessed foods that only need to be heated and served,” said Angela Huffman, president and co-founder of Farm Action, a farmer-led watchdog pushing for government and corporate accountability in the agricultural sector.

She added that schools need help moving beyond an industrial food service model toward meals made with whole ingredients and regional produce. That means investing in menu experts, better kitchen equipment, and staff training — “the tools schools need to serve the kinds of healthy meals every child deserves.”

‘Everyone deserves good food’

To that end, Brigaid partners directly with school districts and handles the recruiting and training of chefs, who then join the district as full-time employees. These chefs run school kitchens the way they would a restaurant — designing menus, ordering ingredients and coaching existing staff to cook meals from scratch — while Brigaid provides ongoing oversight and support across its network.

Although every district has different needs, each Brigaid chef’s main job is to strengthen the existing cafeteria team.

But that can be a heavy lift. For decades, most public schools haven’t had the facilities or staffing to cook real meals, relying instead on reheating premade foods, Civil Eats reported. Chefs must retrain staff — many of whom have prepared food the same way for years — to work with raw ingredients such as chicken instead of simply reheating frozen food.

Brigaid frames its mission simply: “Everyone deserves good food — whether you are a paying restaurant customer, a high school student, a senior in assisted living, or a person living in incarceration.” By placing professional chefs in institutions, Brigaid says it is helping food service programs succeed and “positively impact the people and communities they serve.”

Brigaid now has 80 employees, including 75 professional chefs working across 45 partnerships in eight states, according to The Guardian.

Cooking in a school ‘makes you a better chef’

For Giusti, feeding a community became a higher calling — one that challenged him to rethink what success in cooking really means. “Cooking in a school or an institution might not make you a better cook, but it makes you a better chef, a better leader and a better professional,” he told The Guardian.

That message has attracted many former restaurant chefs who wanted their work to matter more. Mai Giffard, a program chef in the Central School District in Rancho Cucamonga, California, grew up on the free lunch program and later cooked in Michelin-starred kitchens before joining Brigaid in 2023.

“With fine dining, you’re cooking for such a small percentage of people that can afford to eat in such restaurants,” she told The Guardian. “With Brigaid, I’m able to reach thousands and thousands of kids.”

That shift in purpose underscores a broader concern about what most schools currently serve.

“Nutritious meals are the cornerstone of children’s learning, behavior, immunity and growth, yet many school lunch programs continue to rely heavily on ultraprocessed foods that undermine health and development,” said Danielle Enblom of the Organic Consumers Association.

She said districts that move toward scratch cooking with whole ingredients and local produce can greatly improve children’s well-being, and noted that models like Brigaid provide “a powerful route to ensuring our young people have the fuel they need to grow and learn.”

Related articles in The Defender

• ‘Shocking’: Heavy Metals, Nearly 50 Pesticides Detected in School Lunches
• ‘100% Not in Line’ With MAHA: USDA Cuts to Critical School Lunch, Local Farm Programs Put Kids at Risk
• California Lawmakers Move to Ban Ultraprocessed Foods From School Lunches
• Ultraprocessed Foods Make Up Over Half of Kids’ Diet, CDC Report Says
• Testing Reveals High Level of Toxic Pesticides in Foods Sold by Top 20 Fast Food Chains