As a 1990 graduate of John Baldwin Elementary School in Danville, and one of five kids, Justin Gagnon clearly remembers the allure of “hot” lunch. Brown-bagging it was healthier for the family budget, but every now and then, Justin’s mom needed a break. Designed to mimic the growing popularity of fast food fare, pizza, hamburgers and frozen burritos ruled the menu back then.
Today, many critics of school lunch would argue that not much has changed. True, the National School Lunch Program has updated their guidelines to ensure that the pizza, hamburgers and burritos which are served are healthier; yet open up any newspaper and you’ll find another “bad news” school lunch story. It seems that from the op-ed pages of the New York Times to local mommy blogs, parents and industry professionals are calling (even screaming) for better lunches for our kids.
These voices of dissent are not lost on Justin, who in addition to being a health-conscious dad, is also the CEO and Co-Owner of Children’s Choice, California’s fastest-growing, family-owned sustainable school lunch company (recently ranked 1027 in Inc. 5000‘s third annual ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies). Featuring scratch cooking using family recipes, local and organic fruits, vegetables, tortillas and breads, hormone and antibiotic-free beef, poultry, and dairy, Children’s Choice is proving to be an innovative solution to “old school” school lunches. And before you can say “tag-you’re it,” Justin and his team can round up a multi-purpose room full of parents and kids more than eager to tell you why. But that would be getting ahead of the story…
LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD
Long before Children’s Choice began cooking up healthier, greener and kid-approved lunches for 122 schools throughout California (the company has kitchens in Danville, San Jose and Huntington Beach), the extended Gagnon family moved to town. Originally from Massachusetts, the Gagnon’s moved to Alamo in the mid 1960’s. Larry Gagnon, Justin’s Dad, fondly remembers growing up next door to his grandparents. “I’d jump the fence into their yard on my way home from school. My Nana would always have something for me. She was an amazing cook, an immigrant from Italy, and I remember being one of the few kids who had bragging rights to a true Sicilian veal cutlet sandwich in high school.” A 1969 graduate of San Ramon Valley High, Larry remembers what a really good lunch meant to him. “It just made my whole day better!”
Fast-forward a few years, with Larry at the stove in the kitchen of his father’s restaurant, Paul’s, in Martinez. In the 1970’s, Larry opened Gagnon’s Catering, which began as a weekend hobby in a small garage converted for cooking. Over the course of the next few years, Larry would marry his sweetheart, Mary Cummings, start a family and grow the business, eventually moving to their current location in the heart of Danville. The Gagnon clan grew to five kids (Justin is second behind his sister, Robbie, who also works in the family business) and would eventually adopt a small lunch program called Children’s Choice.
As Larry tells it, those days hummed with activities—a business owner and father of five, Larry happily and tirelessly went from catering a wedding, to a son’s baseball game, to a daughter’s dance recital, to donating hours (and pots and pots of homemade spaghetti) to various school and church fundraisers. It’s clear that he never wanted to miss out on a single moment of his full family life and his voice still vibrates with energy and passion.
RE-IMAGINING SCHOOL LUNCH
For many years, Children’s Choice was content to exist as a simple school lunch company, an adjunct to the growing catering business, which served just a handful of schools more out of a service to the community than as any kind of profitable venture. In 2003 Larry called his son, Justin, to tell him that he’d buy him and his two best friends, Ryan Mariotti and Keith Cosbey, all three IT consultants, airplane tickets if they would come to California and build a program website for Children’s Choice. Orders were increasing, and it seemed that it might be a good idea to bring Children’s Choice into the technology age. All three are Notre Dame graduates, successful technical professionals, and knew that it would take more than a weekend to build a website. But Justin had a hunch that adding technology alone wasn’t enough to maximize the potential of Children’s Choice.
A little marketplace research and several soul-searching conversations later, and the three agreed to make the leap into school food service. They had begun to tire of the corporate merry-go-round and the original concept of a company devoted solely to school lunch, taking advantage of technical advancements and highlighting quality local ingredients and more nutritional fare for kids, offered something truly meaningful.
Motivated by the vision of building a company with a greater purpose than themselves, they decided to leave behind the security of corporate America for the wild frontier of entrepreneurialism. (It helped that Larry and Mary Gagnon had agreed that all three could reside, rent-free, at the Gagnon’s home, fondly referred to as the “Compound.”) Justin, Ryan and Keith, former Notre Dame Glee Club members and now full-time entrepreneurs, steeped themselves in full start-up mode. Building Children’s Choice 1.0 demanded weeks of 20-hour days which started over a grill in the hot kitchen. The afternoons would find Keith pitching schools on their unique lunch program, Justin analyzing nutritional data, and Ryan, after endless hours of web design and site coding, inevitably slumped over a keyboard, dozing in front of a computer screen.
The sleep-deprived blur of this start-up period would not only prove fruitful for a reinvigorated family business, but the new Children’s Choice would lay the groundwork for a much needed innovation in school lunch.
THE LUNCH “LADIES”
Lovingly dubbed the “Lunch Ladies” by their fellow Notre Dame alums, Justin, Ryan and Keith passionately believe in the link between building healthy eating habits and offering plenty of choice. Today, Children’s Choice’s story and mission has grown from serving dozens of bag lunches to providing a fully-integrated, premium, sustainable school lunch program to almost 100 schools in the greater Bay Area.
Featuring all-natural, locally sourced and organic ingredients in all their meals at both private and public schools, Children’s Choice allows parents to preorder their children’s entrées online, using a highly customized, proprietary website with unparalleled ordering flexibility. With nutritional information, allergen statements, entrée descriptions and pictures online, parents and kids are provided with all of the information they need to make responsible choices.
Pre-ordering gives Children’s Choice the opportunity to offer 16 different entrées each day from an ever-expanding kidapproved menu, while reducing waste through their innovations
in compostable packaging. With so many choices, the company’s philosophy reminds parents to involve kids when ordering online, and once kids are at school, they are thrilled to be able to ‘shop’ and choose their own healthy snack and fresh fruits, veggies and drinks from a vast selection.
THE GREENING OF SCHOOL LUNCH
For less than the cost of a venti latte, Children’s Choice melds high-quality, local ingredients into their expansive suite of kidfriendly, homemade entrées, including hand-rolled sushi; family recipe, reduced-fat pasta sauces; lean, home-style turkey pot roast; pesto lasagna made with fresh pasta; BBQ and chicken Caesar salads with organic romaine lettuce; hand-rolled, antibiotic-free chicken enchiladas; and turkey pesto sandwiches on fresh, Semifreddi’s ciabatta.
Children’s Choice also partners with Earthbound Organics, Annie’s Naturals, local, family farmers and a growing list of other like-minded, sustainable businesses. As a Certified Green Business and recent winner of the 2009 Sustainability Champion Award from Sustainable Contra Costa, Children’s Choice is leading the industry with green innovations such as the development of the first-ever compostable hot meal tray and compostable clear bags for their fresh cut fruits and vegetables. “Being a green business and growing a successful company are not inherently opposing forces; we’re interested in rewriting the textbook when it comes to school food service. Sustainable alternatives are sometimes more expensive, but as a dad, an uncle, a business owner and a concerned citizen, I believe the choices we are making will benefit our children both now and in the future,” Justin notes.
Apparently it’s paying off. Over the past school year and with the company’s expansion into Southern California, the company has grown 70% and shows no signs of slowing.
GINNY HAIR