Happy National School Lunch Week! Perhaps there are no holiday cards to honor this event, but in the world of Sodexo School Services and our thousands of clients and customers, this is a BIG deal and worthy of talking about. Each year, 5.2 billion school lunches are served in 99,000 schools. That makes about 31 million meals a day, and Sodexo serves more than 2.5 million of those nutritious meals each day to students and teachers across the country. Our customers have come to expect the best food, the best quality and the best choices in their school cafeterias. To us, providing breakfast, lunch, after school snacks and yes, sometimes even dinner to our customers is our mission as well as our job. There is no arguing the link between good nutrition and student achievement; the facts are in and it’s indisputable.

Are you feeling guilty about not packing a brownbag lunch for your child? Don’t! Here’s what school lunch can do for your child:

1. Lunch keeps kids powered up throughout the day. Because the average meal takes no more than about four to five hours to digest, skipping lunch can cause a student to suffer from afternoon sluggishness. Your brain and working muscles need quality fuel every four to five hours with a mixture of carbohydrates, protein and healthy fats in the right portions. The school lunch program is designed to help students get the right mix of foods and nutrients to keep them shining all day long.

2. Eating lunch helps with weight maintenance. Some students may think they will skip lunch to conserve calories and hopefully lose weight. This technique usually backfires for many reasons. One, students tend to be ravenous later and then overeat calories later in the day. Two, the body becomes more efficient at storing body fat because it perceives it is being starved. Three, both mental and physical energy can suffer. This could mean that performance on the big exam or during the big game could be seriously compromised by skipping meals. It’s not worth it to skip.

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Desiree de la Torre, MPH

I am earning my Masters in Business Administration from the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School in Baltimore, Maryland. Like other students, I’m very aware of the fact that the economy has had a big impact on business and that many of us are hoping that there is a place in the business world for us when we graduate. But, we’re also concerned about the kind of company we work for. Even in this economy – maybe even more so in this economy – it’s important to me that the company I work for have concern for its employees and ethics. The situation right now, with a lot of companies going under and having so many business issues, seems to be an underlying problem of ethics. A lot of companies are suddenly talking about their codes of ethics, but they seem reactive. I would hope they would have been doing these things all along.

So, to see a company that has focused all along on codes of conduct is appealing.

I recently went to hear a speech by George Chavel, Sodexo’s CEO. He was speaking as part of the Carey Business School Leaders & Legends lecture series.

While I’m earning my Masters, I’m working with Johns Hopkins Health System to increase access to care for some of Baltimore’s poorest residents. Originally, I wanted to become a physician and I was interested in public health. I realized that the research I was intending to do wasn’t quick enough for me and that I wanted to make a difference much more quickly. That led to a hospital management fellowship with the Johns Hopkins Health System.

I was interested in hearing what Mr. Chavel would have to say about how a big company like Sodexo was handling the kinds of issues that concern me. I feel that more companies are taking an ethical concern in the environment and health care and it’s great to hear that large companies, like Sodexo, are doing that.

We students do have a bit of cynicism about promises from big companies. At the Cary Business School, we’re taught that you’re concerned not only with yourself, but also concerned for the world around you. For big companies not to be concerned about how their actions affect other things, concerns young people in business schools. That’s one of the reasons I enjoyed the speech.

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We’ve all seen the movies, in which the ultimate last resort is putting Granny in “a home.” The implication is that the “home” is a terrible place for Granny to spend her last years. But, along came the Baby Boomers and their sheer numbers have led to changes in almost every venue they touch. Retirement is no exception and Boomers -- those born between 1946 and 1964 – are getting ready to retire in the style with which they’ve become accustomed. The oldest Baby Boomers turned 60 in 2006, and when the trend peaks in 2030, the number of people over age 65 will soar to 71.5 million -- one in every five Americans. This is twice the number as in 2000.

The facilities where these retiring Boomers live reflect the latest trends. Sodexo provides dining and nutrition programs and building services to 450 senior living facilities and we’ve been at the vanguard of the trends in senior living.

The biggest trend is away from the “institutional” and toward the home away from home.

Baby Boomers are demanding (and getting) facilities that remind them of the homes they left. Even those who need more care are opting for smaller, more home-like residences that are essentially big houses with eight to 10 bedrooms and private bathrooms, common living rooms and dining rooms and 24-hour caregivers.

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The kids are back in school now, and the news stories are focused on what all those children packed into schools will mean for swine flu. While we are rightly keeping an eye on our children’s welfare, I want to make sure we don’t lose sight of the importance of keeping healthy at the place so many parents gather every day: the workplace. With many offices going paperless, we often hear more concern about the kind of virus that comes from a computer hacker rather than the office-mate with the hacking cough, but in these days of swine flu, we need to keep an eye on both. True, less paper is being handed from one germ-laden hand to another, but many things in the workplace get touched by lots of people, from the door handles to the phones, to elevator buttons, and touching any one of those right after someone with the flu can leave you vulnerable. Add to that the people you shake hands with before a meeting. 

Federal officials have said that in the worst case scenario, 60 million to 120 million people in the U.S. could be infected with the H1N1 flu this fall and winter. That would mean 1.8 million people hospitalized and as many as 90,000 dying. The officials say they don’t want to frighten anyone, just grab their attention and remind them that the virus is dangerous. While I’m still hoping this ends up being more of a Y2K type of much ado about nothing, they did get my attention!

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Labor Day is coming up and that makes me think about work. When I was 21, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I may have been washing dishes at school in Florida for a company called Saga, but I was a finance major, and I was going to be a banker. Saga – which later became Marriott and, still later, Sodexo – had offered me a job, but I headed to my home state of New York to take a look at the world of banking. But a funny thing happened at the bank. I sat in the bank all day, watching what people did all day and I thought, “For the love of God, I would die in this environment.”

I wanted to be surrounded by people and involved in their lives and careers. Sodexo has offered me that. 

I started out in Florida with Sodexo, but I didn’t stay there. One Friday night, I was in a movie theater and someone came in and found me and asked me if I would be interested in going to Beaumont, Texas as part of an opening team at a site there. I had never done that, so I said I would. I got talked into staying there a year, and then they offered me a year in Dallas, and a couple of years later, I was a district manager out of Oklahoma.

I live in Irving, Texas now. I’ve been at Sodexo 31 years, and soon it will be five years that I’ve been President of Campus Services – the longest I’ve ever been in one job at Sodexo. I’m also on the board of the Sodexo Foundation, which gives me a chance to fight hunger, one of the more fun things we get to do around here. My 21-year-old self would never have believed I would stay anywhere that long.

But at Sodexo, I found that people were always treated with respect and dignity, I always felt like I had a voice, I always worked for people I admired, and it felt like home. Through the years, headhunters have called, but I never felt like anything they offered matched what I already had.

 I think Sodexo stuck with me because I was always accountable. I delivered. I guess I did what was expected of me, and maybe more. I like to work hard and, at Sodexo, that matters.

I’m not unique. I was at a Town Hall meeting and, when I asked for a show of hands of who came up through the ranks like I did, more than half the room raised their hands. In fact, in this past year, almost 570 people have moved from hourly positions to salaried, and more than 40 moved into executive positions.

Looking back, I never expected to have the kinds of opportunities I’ve had. Sodexo isn’t the kind of place where you can screw up and move up, but it is the kind of company that looks at the good in people and doesn’t look for failure. People are going to make mistakes, but if a company isn’t only judging you on those, it makes it easier to take the kind of risks that help you excel.

If you find something you love to do, and the company is the kind of place that likes to reward people who are already working hard inside the company, it makes you want to stay – and THAT’S something you can take to the bank!

What about your company? Does it promote from within, or does it always bring in outsiders at higher levels?