Wednesday, May 16, 2012 by Lee Mannering
PMA supports Delaware school with salad bar donation
Last Friday, PMA donated a salad bar to Downes Elementary School in Newark, Delaware, as part of the Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools national campaign. You might recall last fall we created an online toolkit/user’s guide on navigating the Salad Bars to Schools website; we used that toolkit in our donation. There were a few new learnings/observations we experienced in the donation process, and I’d like to share them with you:
- Reach out to the school administration/district officials early. In the process of donating the salad bar, we discovered that Downes’ specifications required an electric salad bar (which cost slightly more than the standard salad bar listed on the Salad Bars to Schools website). If we had just donated the standard amount online, it would not have met Downes’ needs.
- Get creative in planning a donation event at the school. Here in Delaware, our minor league baseball team has a mascot called Mr. Celery (yes, I am serious. He really exists.). One of my colleagues has a contact with the team and was able to arrange for Mr. Celery’s presence at the school. The kids’ reaction when he entered Downes’ cafeteria was unreal, very rock star-esque.
- If you donate it, kids will eat. Going to the school Friday, I was a bit anxious as to how the students would use the salad bar and how it would be received. However, seeing lines of kids waiting to get salad quickly put those thoughts to rest.

Students from John R. Downes Elementary School enjoy the new healthful choices on the salad bar donated by PMA.
After the event, we saw Downes’ school garden (which we also helped fund through a local program). In all, it was a very produce-centric day and it left me with a better understanding of the salad bar process as well as how much the students enjoyed having fresh fruits and vegetables as a healthful option in their cafeteria.
If you’ve donated a salad bar to a school, tell us about it in the Increasing Consumption Community on PMA Xchange. And if you haven’t donated one, please do so. It is rewarding for the kids, the school, the community, and your organization. To see photos from the salad bar donation event, visit our Flickr stream.