Joey's Cafe supplies nutricion for Learning

	Eating right is critical to a child's performance in school
NO Coca Cola NO Pepsi Cola No Carbonated soft drinks at all No refined sugar No candy No gum No prepackaged snack foods.		100% Fruit Juices 100% Cane Juice "Dulce" Fresh Popcorn Fresh fruit "Licuados" Well balanced meals "Baleadas" Hamburgers Fresh Plantain chips Granola
	Joey's Cafe is named in loving memory of a young boy named Joey who came into this world, definitely made his presence felt and sadly left way too soon. A very generous donation from his parents made it possible for us to demolish our old kitchen (left) and build this brand new commercial quality kitchen and food service facility. Joey's legacy is the best possible nutrition for all our students. Welcome to JOEY'S CAFE.

In keeping with our goal of giving our young Honduran students the best possible educational base, we decided to pay very close attention to the nutritional quality of everything we offer in our cafeteria. All our research shows that good nutrition is critical to being able to perform well in school. Our research also shows certain very popular drinks and snacks have a definite detrimental effect on a student's ability to calm down, concentrate and think clearly. This research brought us to the point where we made the decision not to accept either Pepsi's or Coke's most generous offers of "help" when we were building our food preparation facility (both required a Multi-year contract whereby we had to agree not to sell any competitive products including freshly prepared natural fruit juices). We have taken this a step or two further and severely limited the range of prepackaged snack foods and beverages we have available in the cafeteria, while substantially increasing the variety of products that we prepare in-house on a daily basis. This has not been either easy or inexpensive but we have already seen a marked improvement in the performance of many of our students, which we can logically attribute to this change.

NUTRITIOUS DRINKS

We make up a variety of 100% fruit juices daily (these include some we make from scratch and others we make from high quality fruit juice concentrate). We offer at least two flavors of juice made fresh each day and whatever is left over gets used to make our famous "topogigos" (local answer to the Popsicle). To satisfy the average Honduran palette we do need to sweeten at least some of the flavors (especially Tamarindo) and after much searching we found a company near Siguatapeque who produce a granulated version of the traditional "Dulce". This product is quite simply "natural unrefined cane sugar" in it's most complete form. We don't just sweeten, we add all the original flavor and nutrition of the sugar cane and the result is a range of delicious juices, drinks and popsicle that are not only plenty sweet enough for everyone to really enjoy but also make a really positive contribution to our student's general nutrition. We also have purified water available in a number of locations around the school so no-one ever needs to be thirsty.

HEALTHY SNACKS

We thought very hard about selling a selection of the many kinds of inexpensive "Churos" (chips and similar items that come in nice sealed bags with expiration dates at some date way off in the future and whose ingredients include all sorts of names that we find impossible to pronounce or even spell). These quick snacks are increasingly becoming an integral part of almost every Honduran child's diet and are one of the biggest profit makers at almost all the other schools. After much thought and deliberation we came to the decision that the best policy was not stock any products that we were not sure about both their freshness and their nutritional value. In order to make sure that we always had something quick and nutritious we purchased a commercial popcorn machine and now our students can get get a good nutritious bag of popcorn anytime they feel like like a quick snack during the day.

GOOD WHOLESOME FRESH FOOD

Classes start at 7:15 and we have a recess at 9:30. The kitchen staff are busy in this 2 hour period making sure that we have a good selection of freshly prepared small meals ready for all the children by the time the bell rings and all 200 of them line up for what might be their first real meal of the day. The freshly prepared Baleadas (beans and cheese wrapped in tortillas), Pastelitos (combination of various meats and vegetables wrapped in flour dough and fried), Tortilla con queso (Latin equivalent of a grilled cheese sandwich), Hamburgers, Hot Dogs, Tacos and assorted sandwiches are some of the small meals we have available at 9:30 AM every morning. And, then comes lunch at 12:00. We make a special effort to insure that everyone including our teachers gets a full plate of good nutritious food at lunch time. The lunch menu is constantly changing and varies from day to day and is always made from the best fresh produce locally available. We really believe that a tummy full of good food makes a big difference in the ability of both our students and our teachers being able to really perform to the best of their individual abilities and we are always looking for new ideas and suggestions to both keep it interesting and improve the nutritional value of everything we serve.

Help Needed

We are always interested in hearing from anyone with Cooking and/or Catering experience.

How would you like to come and see what you can get our kitchen to produce?

Do you have any special recipes that are inexpensive and reasonably easy to prepare?

Please don't hesitate to send us your suggestions.