Exploring Life & Business with Emily Burson of School Nutrition Plus

Today we’d like to introduce you to Emily Burson.

Hi Emily, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
In my first job out of school at Pepperdine, I worked as a dietitian for a company that did food safety and food service consulting for various organizations, including hotels and casinos in Las Vegas. After seeing the inner workings of those large kitchen operations, (to fully enjoy Las Vegas, it’s best not to look behind the scenes.) I was hooked on food service and decided not to take the healthcare route that most dietitians end up on. In my mid-20s, I landed in the K-12 school division of a large public company. There, I was able to tap into my interests of feeding underserved communities and managing large groups of employees as we work towards a common goal. Ensuring children don’t go hungry, as well as creating a company culture focused on empathy are where my heart is.

Once I got a little older and established in the school food industry, I realized, for several reasons, that I needed to be my own boss. I have some old sports injuries and needed a flexible schedule and work environment so I didn’t have to sit very much. As we speak, I’m laying on a couch in my office. I also had a vision of doing things differently than my various bosses and leading with a more empathetic approach, and frankly, I wanted to wear jeans to work and ditch the mandatory closed-toed loafers of my corporate job.

So, I quit my job with the back-up plan of being a hospital dietitian to pay the bills, and I set out on my own. At first, I dreamed of doing something more glamorous than school food, like the fashion industry, but then reality set in and I said to myself, “Do what you know.” So, I mailed 400 postcards to charter schools and got only one response, but that led to a paying consulting job. I started working on a menu for a school, which required that I work with their caterer. I quickly saw opportunity within the catering company and inserted myself in every aspect of the business based on my past experience. After six months with them, I had a few employees of my own and was ready to find a kitchen and start my own catering company.

Enter my business partner, Brandon Neumen. He was working for my previous company, and approached me wanting to partner with a large client already in his pocket. With his skills as a chef, it was the perfect compliment, so we took the plunge. Fast forward 16 years later and he’s my brother from another mother, and we have 150 employees and continue to grow.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
First, I’ll say that we survived Covid both by pivoting to a grab and go model and due to government assistance.

Early on, though, we sometimes pushed our limits and took on more than we could handle. One example being a job that we took catering a summer camp in the Sierra Nevada mountains. I’m grew up in Visalia and went to the camp myself, and had some connections to the local YMCA, so I convinced Brandon that it would be a great idea to earn extra revenue during a slow summer. Well, it ended up looking more like the movie “Meatballs”. Our employees fought, hooked up, abandoned the job and Brandon even had to row food across the lake because a tree fell and blocked the road. I worked every day for two months, had to live part-time with my parents, and because there was no cell reception at the camp, if I wasn’t on-site, I had to have my phone with me at all times in case someone called me from the one pay phone. That’s when I started showering with my phone and sadly still haven’t broken that habit. However, we did make some money and Brandon bought a new car. Was it worth it? No. We never bid on any project like that again. Overall though, I consider ourselves lucky that the valleys haven’t been too low.

We’ve been impressed with School Nutrition Plus, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
My company is School Nutrition Plus and we specialize in community catering, primarily to charter schools, but also after school and rec and parks programs, and senior centers. Looking back, I shouldn’t have pigeonholed us by using “School” in the name, but I only had one day to come up with it, and we certainly aren’t changing it now. We are mostly known as “SNP”, though.

One of the biggest challenges companies in our industry face is feeding kids healthy food on limited government reimbursement. Despite this, Brandon and I are committed to scratch cooking and that’s how we designed and built our facility. We believe that everyone deserves the healthiest, tastiest, least processed food possible, make by skilled cooks. I’m proud that we’ve been able to do this for so long and outlast many of our competitors. Ask around our niche industry and people will describe us as “professional”, “responsive”, with “the best food”, and we couldn’t be more proud. In 2019, we published a cookbook of our recipes called, “A Chef Walks into a Cafeteria…”, where we scaled them down for home use to further expose kids and families to scratch cooking.

Before we go, is there anything else you can share with us?
Brandon and I couldn’t do any of it without our employees. We focus on their quality of life just as much as our customers and we have more than 25 employees who have been with us for 10-15 years and counting.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.schoolnutritionplus.com
• Instagram: SchoolNutritionPlus

Image Credits
Christina Gandolfo