Roch’s Fruit & Produce

An Important Midpoint Between the Farm
and the School Lunch Table

By Gloria DE Paola

Photos by Ryan Conaty

Ray Roch Sr. began selling local produce 57 years ago from the back of a truck in West Warwick’s Veterans Square. His customers were mill workers from the villages of Arctic and Centerville. Back then, in the early 1950s, housewives cooked their family meals from scratch and children carried their lunches to the nearby Maisie Quinn and John Horgan elementary schools in brown paper bags or metal lunch boxes decorated with pictures of Mickey Mouse and Roy Rogers.

Roch’s Market is still a family-run business that sources from area farms, but in addition to its West Warwick retail store, 16 refrigerated trucks deliver fruits and vegetables to restaurants, schools and hotels in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut. A newer, upscale Roch’s market opened in Narragansett in 2002. But West Warwick is still a working class town—one of the poorest in the state.

One third of the town’s population falls below the federal poverty level with incomes of less than $22,350 for a family of four, according to Heather Snow, Roch’s food processing manager. At the beginning of each month food stamps account for 60% of the market’s retail sales in West Warwick. Healthy meals are a challenge on the home front and many children rely on the school nutrition program.

When the Federal Fresh Fruit and Produce Program grants for local schools became available in 2006, Donna Walker of Sodexo, a school food service supplier, asked Heather for help in applying for funds to improve the town’s elementary school lunches. Roch’s began processing the fresh fruits and vegetables from local farms and out-of-state suppliers and delivered them to the Quinn and Horgan elementary schools every day.

When the program began Heather was able to keep track of quantities on a Post-it note. Today Roch’s is still feeding local children but now it processes the fruits and vegetables for 71 school cafeterias throughout Rhode Island. Daily quantities for each classroom are recorded on an inch-thick pile of computerized spreadsheets that are tweaked every day. That’s because in some cities and towns the number of children enrolled school changes daily.

Heather lives in West Warwick and knows many of the local students through Scouting and other community activities. But she was shocked to discover that some of them had never tasted things like strawberries or blueberries.

“They had no idea of melons,” she said. In a contemporary version of the classic scene from Oliver Twist, they would ask for strawberries:

“Can I have another one of those red things?”

The schools that participate [those with 50% or more students who qualify for free or reduced-cost lunch] really need it,” she says. “We know the kids get breakfast, a snack and a nutritious lunch.”

Ray Roch Jr. has become a big fan of the program as well. He believes it introduces kids to unfamiliar foods and Roch’s makes them as convenient to eat as a candy bar or a package of chips. “I hope it continues for a long, long time,” he says of the government program. “[Fresh fruit and vegetables] cost a little more than is budgeted for each child in the system, but it’s worth it. We also realize how important it is to work with our local farmers so that Rhode Island school kids can eat what’s grown in their own state.”

Farmer David Cotta of Quonset View Farm in Portsmouth can speak for a majority of Rhode Island farmers when he says it would be difficult to process (clean, chop and prepare) his crops for school consumption. It’s an issue for many local farmers who don’t have the facilities or the budget for processing whole foods, making them easier to serve in schools, hospitals and so forth. “I wouldn’t be doing it,” he says. “There’s enough to do just to grow [potatoes and other crops].” He is pleased with the program because he’s able to sell his potatoes directly to Roch’s at a fair price.

The children love fruit—vegetables not so much. But there are tricks to get them to try new things. If a teacher eats string beans or a star fruit, their students will try it too. “It’s surprising what kids will eat,” says Heather. “If a school football player eats dandelion greens, the others will try them too.”

That’s gratifying. But getting fresh produce into 35,000 fruit cups every two days takes logistical skills and lots of hand labor. All those carrots, peppers and cherry tomatoes have to be washed, trimmed, cut up and put into serving-size containers. When the program began, one employee prepared 500 to 800 cups of fruit and veggies every day for the two West Warwick schools.

Now it takes 30 workers to prep and deliver fresh food to the participating schools every day. It begins in June when Heather meets with the 13 Rhode Island farmers who currently supply school produce through the high harvest season.

Together they plan what to buy and how much the local growers can supply (the rest comes from outside the state). The Rhode Island Farm-to-School program, created by Kids First Rhode Island to work in concert with the Federal fruit and produce grant program, gives farmers a guaranteed market so they can plant the extra crops the schools will need—like the 12,000 ears of corn Providence students ate on a special corn day in October.

The kids love corn, but those golden ears have to be shucked and trimmed. Ten Roch’s employees work regularly from 11 pm to 7 am washing, trimming, peeling, slicing and dicing the produce. All that work is done by hand, using very sharp knives. At 7 am another team arrives to package the cut-up fruits and vegetables into 4-ounce serving cups—roughly 15,000 cups a day. From 3 pm until 11 pm a third group of workers arrives to label and number the cups for every classroom in the nine school districts that participate in the program. The 3,000 trays that go out every day are stored in walk-in refrigerators until they are ready to be delivered.

At some point in this long day a local pig farmer comes by for the peels, husks and skins to feed his livestock. That’s 30 50-gallon tubs of food trimmings that don’t have to be taken to the Central Landfill every week.

And all of this work is done in a room slightly larger than a twocar garage. Food safety is taken seriously at Roch’s and the processing room is sanitized and hosed down after every shift.

School menus are planned 45 days in advance, but New England’s quirky weather sometimes leaves suppliers scrambling for substitutions. “Mother Nature doesn’t play well here,” says Heather. There are gaps in the growing season; when peaches or zucchini are no longer available locally, they may not be quite ready from out of state sources either.

That means more substitutions. There are the fussy eaters who won’t touch speckled bananas. Younger students can’t finish a large apple but for high school students, three apples are just a snack.

It gets complicated, managing the work shifts, the processing, the numbers, the farm deliveries and more. But Heather has a folder full of thank you notes in Spanish and English from kids who are learning to like good-for-you greens.

Lizabeth, a fifth-grader in West Warwick’s Alfred Lima School, wrote, “From now on I am going to stop eating junk food like potato chips, candy, gum and much more. Then I am going to start eating healthy food. I am going to tell my mom about this and tell her that we need to eat healthy things from now on.”

“Those thank you notes and pictures are daily reminders of why we do this,” says Heather. eR

Gloria De Paola is a freelance writer who lives in East Greenwich.