A partnership between farmers, a nonprofit food processor and the Office of Public Instruction is dishing up a new made-in-Montana sauce in schools around the state. Students are giving it two thumbs up.
At lunchtime in Missoula’s Jeannette Rankin Elementary School, third-grader Jerrin Egan said there’s something different happening in the cafeteria.
“It’s like the marinara-sauce voting competition,” Egan says. “So, if you try it, you get to vote up there.”
Egan and his fellow students did get to vote, but not in a competition. They had a chance to speak their mind about Montana Marinara, a sauce that combines USDA-issued canned tomatoes with locally grown ingredients like butternut squash, carrots, onions and more.
Egan and others dipped their cheese-filled breadsticks into a cup of the marinara and put a sticker on a board to place their vote — “tried it,” “liked it,” or “loved it.” The 8-year-old fell squarely in the last column.
“It was mind blowing,” Egan says.
The sauce is the brain-child of several nonprofits including Mission West Community Development Partners and the Western Montana Growers Co-op, which shared a goal of bringing more local produce into schools.
Anne Harney with Mission West says combining local ingredients with USDA-issued foods is a cost-effective way to do that.
“We’re not getting the veggies from 2,000 miles away,” Harney says. “They’re all coming from within, I think, within a hundred miles of our processing facility. They’re really nutrient-dense, they’re very fresh.”
The sauce is processed in Ronan and more than 150 school districts across the state have placed orders so far. The program was paid for with a USDA grant and leftover pandemic-era money.
Missoula was one stop on the partnership’s “Marinara Madness” tour around the state to get feedback from students. Harney says the partners are already exploring ways to bring other locally-sourced recipes into schools.
And the result at Jeannette Rankin Elementary? A landslide for “loved it.”
