Huband Park Elementary Salad Bar
What an incredible journey and fun time this was!
My Role as the Salad Bar Coordinator
Some of our achievements include:
- Created check lists for kitchen volunteers – according to feature of the week. What ingredients and how much to be served.
- Created grocery lists (according to feature of the week)
- Weekly totals are recorded: cost of groceries, number of students on list, number of plates served, weight of the waste, what class helped serve, who volunteered and what feature was served.
- 11 of our 16 volunteers took the food safe course
- We now have three wonderful ladies that do all our grocery shopping every Monday (the day before salad bar). I create a weekly grocery list and email it to them by Sunday night.
- Created a nutritional education board that is changed monthly: Eating a rainbow, what is our carbon footprint, meet the farmers and next month will feature the salad bar volunteers and their kids.
- Increased our volunteers from 5 to 20
- Create a schedule for volunteers so everyone is getting time off (salad bar is a full day of volunteering and in order for the salad bar to be sustainable ….volunteers need to be rotated)
- Added a second salad bar, and doubled the equipment
- New large cabinet for all our salad bar equipment
- Created a rotation schedule for student helpers (Gr 4-7) each week. 6 helpers from 11:15 to 12:00. Each week a different class helps out.
- Have aprons made and embroidered in school colors for kids to wear (kids are so proud to wear them). Helps to increase the buzz around the salad bar and community.
- Add Greek day: We now have Mediterranean wraps, Mexican, Asian, Buns, Italian pasta, and homemade pizza day. These are all special “features” that are an addition to the rainbow of salad.
- Decreased waste from 13 lbs to an average of 4-5 lbs. Education in classes was very helpful.
- Education in each classroom about waste 2x.
- Waste is fed to the local chickens
- We have been in the local newspaper twice
- We have a salad bar video on YouTube: Watch Video.
- Huband salad bar has been featured in the Edible Valley Podcast: Listen to Podcast.
- Organized 3 Vanier students from the prep program to come each week from 9:45 till 11:15 to cut all the veggies, help with set up and eat salad bar – they come with a support worker
- We have had 6 student nurses come to help out from our local college
- Outsourced more local farms / ingredients / bakery / butcher
- New principal is very supportive of salad bar which makes all these things easier to implement
- Almost doubled the number of kids eating salad bar – 130-150 (2016-2017) to 210–220 (2017-2018).
- Several friendships have come out of the salad bar program along with many social events outside of school. Proud to say we have created a “salad bar community!”

