3 ways the nutrition team at Wichita Public Schools is utilizing AI

While AI is still in its infancy, some school nutrition operators are embracing the tech and have already begun to incorporate it into their day-to-day operations.

During the School Nutrition Association’s (SNA) Annual National Conference (ANC) held this week in Boston, members of the nutrition team at Wichita Public Schools in Wichita, Kansas, shared how they’re utilizing Chat GPT and other AI platforms to help them with everything from employee training to creating content for newsletters.

Here's some ways the team is embracing artificial intelligence. 

1. Simplifying training

At Wichita, employees have varying levels of skill in the kitchen.

Chef Andrew Terronez has turned to Chat GPT to help him simplify recipes and other instructions for staff who may not have as much kitchen experience as some of their peers. Terronez will simply tell the AI-enabled chat platform to rewrite recipes into an easier-to-follow format, and the program will provide a simplified version.  

While the tech is helpful, Terronez cautions that operators need to double check its work and make sure it contains no errors or misinformation. For example, there have been instances where Chat GPT has put things in Celsius, Terronez said.

“Basically, think of [AI] as your friend who knows everything and likes to tell you about it, right or wrong,” he said. “There are inherent risks with AI because it pulls everything from the internet and weird stuff is out there.”

Terronez also uses AI to translate training videos recorded in English into other languages. After recording the video in English, he uses an AI translator platform to translate it into the language(s) needed.

“Everybody usually has someone where English probably isn’t their first language, and this is just something that could help with that,” he noted.

2. Coming up with menu ideas

When the district began rolling out breakfast in the classroom, some teachers were hesitant about implementing the program because they were worried about the meals making a mess.

In response, Terronez decided to fill the breakfast in the classroom menu with mess-free recipes and turned to Chat GPT to help him brainstorm.

“I asked it for school breakfast ideas where mess is minimal and it [gave me] ideas,” he said.

Similar to using the program for training, operators still need to review and edit Chat GPT’s responses as needed, Terronez advised, but it can, “help get the ball rolling” when trying to come up with ideas for new menu items.

3. Creating content for websites, newsletters and more

Outside of the kitchen, Assistant Director Adrea Katzenmeier uses Chat GPT to create content for things like the nutrition team’s website, job fair flyers and the quarterly employee newsletter by simply entering in a prompt about what she wants the content to be about.

During the session, she showed how she recently used it to create a page on their website about the district’s upcoming summer meals program by simply typing in the information she wanted Chat GPT to include.  

“I'm pretty much feeding it all that information, the details of our sites, the dates, the times, all the information that parents might want to know, and then out pops some good content in great formatting that I can use by copying and pasting into my website and reviewing and editing as needed,” she said.