Door-to-Door Meal Delivery
Two days after school buildings closed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Simone Saldanha of the SFUSD Student Nutrition Services (SNS) department received a phone call that became the launch point for a trailblazing meal delivery program.
“Hey Simone, I was wondering if you wanted to noodle out a problem,” said Executive Director Jennifer LeBarre. “Let’s figure out if we can find a solution to deliver meals to our families with disabled children. Essentially, it’s families who may not be able to leave the house because of their child’s disability and we would like to get food to them.” Saldanha and her team accepted the challenge.
At the time of the phone call, SFUSD’s SNS, the largest food service provider in the City of San Francisco, had already pivoted from serving 37,000 meals per day at school cafeterias to launching a city-wide Grab and Go meal service within the course of just a few days. At the Grab and Go meal sites, students and their families could safely pick up a week’s worth of free meals to take home while schools were closed.
Two weeks later, after a multi-departmental planning effort, family outreach led by SFUSD’s Special Education staff, and rapid mobilization and flexibility on the part of SFUSD’s dining staff, the innovative Door-to-Door meal delivery service was launched.
Dining staff prepared boxes with five days worth of food - much of which was made fresh by the district’s chef Joshua Davidson and his culinary team, and supplemented with shelf-stable items as well as fresh fruits and vegetables. SFUSD employees volunteered to deliver the food boxes directly to students’ homes, following routes that were carefully mapped out by the district’s Transportation team.
By the end of July 2021, SNS had delivered nearly 15,000 meal boxes containing more than 220,000 meals for high-need students, including students with disabilities and their siblings, students with severe food allergies, and geographically isolated students.
Even before the pandemic, the growing rate of income inequality and the high cost of living made it harder than ever for families to make ends meet. With widespread unemployment and food insecurity more than tripling in San Francisco during the pandemic, the need for school meals became more pronounced than ever. SFUSD stepped up in this moment of crisis for many families, and the gratitude from the community was palpable.
“One of the biggest challenges for us was to adjust to remote learning and working
at the same time. Preparing food that’s nutritious for our kid can be challenging for our schedule, especially because she has a lot of allergies. The meal deliveries were very helpful and exceeded my expectations by a lot.”
While it was a huge lift for SFUSD to launch the program, the program did not happen in isolation. Years of public and private investment into SNS for facilities improvements, new equipment, and multiple program innovations paved the way for the meal delivery and other rapid pandemic response programs to flourish. The district’s state-of-the-art central kitchen, McAteer Culinary Center, where all the food in the meal boxes were cooked from scratch, had just opened five months prior to school shutdowns.
The Door-to-Door meal delivery service was originally intended to be a short-term, emergency program during the pandemic, but the program has continued to evolve as circumstances and the environment have changed around it. As volunteer staff returned to their regular duties and school buildings reopened to in-person learning, SNS shifted to a partnership with Revolution Foods to fill the boxes and Food Connect to deliver meals to medically fragile students who enrolled in SFUSD’s online learning program.
“I hope the legacy of the meal delivery program is that families feel confident in having their children eat school meals because they have trust in SFUSD’s Student Nutrition Services to provide a good meal and dining experience,” said Saldanha. “We see you, we hear you, and we will continue to be here for you.”