Opaa! Food Management

Connecting IT Decisions to Operational Impact

In school nutrition the main goal is pretty simple: get more kids eating a good meal and do it within a budget set by federal reimbursement rates. Every technology decision I make gets measured against that. If a project doesn’t help our kitchen staff feed students faster, order smarter or spend less time on paperwork, it goes to the back of the line.

Over the past five years we’ve built our technology foundation from the ground up to support more than 300 school districts. Our home office is only about 40 people supporting more than 3,500 employees in the field, so we’ve had to stay lean and bring in outside partners where we needed more depth. That lets us spend our own time on the problems that are unique to school food, since nobody understands those as well as the people dealing with them every day.

Integrating Technology Around the Student Experience

Foodservice, especially in K-12, runs on a handful of systems that were never designed to work together. The register on the serving line, menu planning and the back office that handles ordering, inventory and billing all do their own jobs well. The trouble is the gaps between them. When information lives in different places, people fill those gaps with manual work and decisions end up being made on feelings and numbers that are already out of date.

What’s worked for us is treating integration as the actual project instead of an afterthought. We look for the spots where someone is re-entering data or waiting on a report, and we connect those first. We also pilot small before scaling. A few sites will teach you more in one semester than any vendor presentation, and proving it works on a small scale is what earns support to expand.

“Spend time with the people doing the actual work and ask what slows them down.”

We also try to keep the student in mind the whole time. Lunch periods are short, and every minute a student spends in line is a minute they aren’t eating. Anything that shortens the line or simplifies the process has a direct effect on how many kids get fed.

Protecting Data Without Compromising Operational Reliability

Schools are a real target. Clever’s Cybersecure 2026 Report found that one in two U.S. school districts had a cybersecurity incident in 2025, and a growing share of those incidents involved outside vendors. Our work touches data connected to kids, and we’re one of those outside partners, so security must be part of the plan from the start. Our main rule is to collect only what we need. When we look at a new system, one of the first questions is whether we can get the operational value without holding any personal student information at all. If we never have it, it can’t leak.

Past that, it’s mostly doing the basics consistently: good endpoint protection, multifactor authentication for everyone and keeping systems patched and current. Reliability gets the same attention. If systems are down on a Monday morning, kitchens can’t place orders, so we plan upgrades and test recovery well before they become urgent.

Putting AI to Work in Everyday Foodservice

I think AI will have the biggest impact, but in practical ways more than flashy ones. Letting staff ask questions of their data in plain language, instead of waiting on a custom report, changes how quickly people can make decisions. AI-assisted development is also letting small teams build tools that used to require an outside firm.

Predictive ordering is close behind. Combining participation history, menus and school calendars can forecast demand well enough to noticeably cut waste. Faster checkout technology is improving quickly too. What all of these have in common is that they don’t work without clean, connected data underneath, so that foundation has to come first.

Staying Curious in a Constantly Changing Field

I didn’t come up through a computer science program. I studied music production, started in an entry-level IT role and learned most of what I know by taking on problems I didn’t know how to solve yet. The most valuable lesson from that is you don’t need all the answers before you start. You need to be willing to dig in and keep learning. I’m still working on certifications today, because technology changes too fast to coast on what you already know.

For anyone looking to lead in technology, my advice is to get to know the business as well as you know the tools. Spend time with the people doing the actual work and ask what slows them down. Most of my best ideas came from those conversations, not from a product demo. If you stay curious and keep listening, the title tends to follow.