Cherry Creek School District in Greenwood Village, Colorado doesn't treat food education as an assembly once a year. The district's Food and Nutrition Services team built a Food Literacy Program that pushes cooking, tasting, and nutrition conversations into the regular school day — and the program earned Cherry Creek the HMI Innovation in Nutrition Education Recognition Award.
Executive Chef Cady Molloy describes the goal plainly: the program should help students and their families build "an environmental, culinary, and nutritional understanding of food, and more specifically, an understanding of the food that we serve in the cafeteria."
Teaching cooking inside elementary classrooms
Rather than outsource nutrition education, Cherry Creek partnered with a local university to train elementary teachers to deliver hands-on cooking and nutrition lessons themselves. That lets the content land in the same room where students already trust the adult at the front of the class, and it keeps the program sustainable — it's not dependent on a single traveling specialist.
In grades 9–12, a dedicated nutrition education class takes the conversation up a level: why sodium and added sugars matter, where school food has been, where it's going, and how the menu itself gets designed. Students taste-test new dishes and give direct feedback on what goes on the tray.
The open house that lets families see the kitchen
Twice a year, the food and nutrition department opens the Student Nutrition Center to families. Parents walk the warehouse, the central bakery, and the production kitchen, and sample scratch-prepared recipes coming off the line. It's a transparent answer to a question nutrition staff hear constantly — "What are my kids actually eating?"
Eight scratch recipes, one cookbook standard
Cherry Creek also earned the HMI Innovation in the Preparation of School Meals Award, based on the work Chef Molloy led to develop eight new scratch-prepared recipes. The team used USDA's Recipe Standardization Guide for School Nutrition Programs as the scaffold — so every new recipe has consistent yields, nutrition analysis, and prep instructions across every school kitchen in the district.
Training staff is the whole game
None of this sticks without a kitchen team that's been set up to execute. Cherry Creek hired a Culinary Trainer whose job is to make sure every staff member feels confident running scratch recipes at scale. That single hire is the difference between a scratch menu that holds together for three years and one that quietly reverts to pre-prepped items the first time a key staff member leaves.