Conscious Kitchen has spent more than a decade developing new ways to get organically grown food onto students’ plates by connecting school leaders directly to local farmers.
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Based in Sausalito, California, the organization now touts over 50 farms in its network and says it has worked with more than 100 school districts statewide as its partners. Its guiding conviction: With the right infrastructure and relationships, organic food can become a much larger part of the school-food supply chain.
And Conscious Kitchen is just getting started. This spring, the nonprofit won a nomination for this year’s Food Planet Prize, which recognizes an organization’s potential to create positive environmental change through food. Conscious Kitchen was one of four finalists out of more than 1,000 applicants worldwide.
Although Conscious Kitchen wasn’t the ultimate winner of the coveted environmental prize—the top award went to a region-wide agroecology movement in South India—the nomination earned it a significant award of $150,000 and served as validation of Conscious Kitchen’s potential to reduce the environmental impact of the way we eat.
Conscious Kitchen’s new goal: to feed 6 million schoolchildren across California with organic local food and potentially serve as a model for school districts in other parts of the country.
To do this, it is chipping away at every facet of a deeply entrenched school food distribution system that has traditionally favored long supply chains over local relationships, bulk ordering over seasonal produce, and readymade simplicity over the flexibility and diversity of scratch cooking.
In addition to linking small and mid-size organic farms with local school districts, Conscious Kitchen has worked with manufacturers of organic pantry foods like cereals and bulk foods like milk to design organic products that meet schools’ needs.
It has helped organize districts to leverage their buying power through cooperative purchasing, while making organic products more economically viable. And it has encouraged major distributors to include organic produce in the catalogs they offer to school districts.
Conscious Kitchen is not alone in its quest to make school meals healthier and upend the food distribution system, though it is uniquely diverse in its approach.
About three-fourths of districts surveyed by the School Nutrition Association last year reported trying to integrate local food into their menus, though food service leaders overwhelmingly cited cost and funding as top concerns. Conscious Kitchen is attempting to solve these hurdles with its all-hands-on-deck approach.
“It’s a very interesting, intricate, nuanced, incredible puzzle, and I think we’re getting to the other end, which is so fun,” said Judi Shils, founder and executive director of Conscious Kitchen. “Just knowing what levers we can pull to help everybody realize what they can do together and then doing it—not waiting, not thinking about it, but just diving in.”
Conscious Kitchen chefs teach students at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Academy in Sausalito, California, about organic produce. (Photo courtesy of Conscious Kitchen)
Shils and her team are convinced that seasonal, organic purchasing can be as simple and straightforward as the current conventional-food pathway.
“The ambition and coherence of Conscious Kitchen’s systems-level approach stood out from the start,” Lina Engler, the general manager of the Food Planet Prize, wrote Civil Eats in an email. “Rather than solving one piece of the puzzle, CK works across the entire chain that spans farm to school.”
In addition to providing a financial boost, the Food Planet Prize nomination serves as key proof of the nonprofit’s concept and a foothold for its expansion mission. Despite a constantly shifting political landscape and a host of other obstacles, Conscious Kitchen believes its model is both durable and replicable, with the potential to work anywhere.
The Seeds of a System Change
In 2013, Shils and her team founded Conscious Kitchen at Bayside Elementary in Marin City, California, an underserved community where 95 percent of students qualified for free and reduced meals. Their goal was to help the school shift from ultraprocessed, prepackaged meals to local, organically grown food.
The organization’s work took off during the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted deeply ingrained supply chains and offered an opportunity for change. School districts were granted a temporary reprieve from the tight shackles of the government-funded and controlled food procurement system, and ensured government reimbursement even if they didn’t adhere to previous standards.
Conscious Kitchen had made an initial foray into a much larger school district—West Contra Costa Unified, in San Francisco’s East Bay. When the pandemic hit, the district’s food service director, Barbara Jellison, quickly tapped the group to locate organic produce for each of 23,000 student meal boxes.
“I called her and said, ‘Is this real?’” Shils recalled. “She goes, ‘Yeah, it’s real. If you build the supply chain, I’ll buy it.’”
Over the next nine months, Conscious Kitchen helped funnel 10.7 million pounds of organic food grown by local farmers into 18.7 million boxed to-go meals for West Contra Costa students, totaling $17 million in purchases. What started with produce quickly expanded to a full box of organic dairy, protein, cereals, and grains.
As the pandemic revealed the fragility of long supply chains, Conscious Kitchen demonstrated the value of a direct link between farmers and the schools that use their food. Rather than let its pandemic momentum fade, the nonprofit used it as a launching pad.
“I knew that I couldn’t not keep blowing this up,” Shils explained.
Creating a Solution for Every Problem
The group’s primary challenge is just getting a foot in the door with school district food-service leaders and small- to mid-size organic farmers to ask for help in rebuilding the supply chain. The farmers don’t lack the will to change, Shils said, but often have no idea where to start.
In 2025, Conscious Kitchen hosted 13 farm-to-school workshops where farmers and school district officials could not only learn about its model, but also meet one another and establish direct relationships. It has continued the dialogue in 2026, with the most recent workshop held in April.
For farmers, opening up a new, large customer base like schools can be invaluable. Small farms are struggling nationwide, with about 15,000 closing or consolidating in the last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Conscious Kitchen’s liaison with schools has been a boon to growers like Frog Hollow Farm, a venerated organic stonefruit farm in Brentwood, California. California schools are the largest client Frog Hollow has had in 50 years of farming, Shils said.
“For a farmer to say that about school-supported agriculture is unheard of,” Shils said.
For school district leaders, there are several major concerns about buying organic foods: the cost, the complexity of ordering food and planning meals in volume, kitchen configuration and capacity (most are only set up for heating food, not cooking it, which also requires more space), and staff training to cook meals from scratch in vast quantities. Also, schools must rise to these challenges while abiding by strict government regulations.
“There’s a lot of strategy involved in all of this,” explained Kristin Hilleman, director of food and nutrition services at the Capistrano Unified School District outside Los Angeles, which produces about 25,000 meals a day.
Conscious Kitchen student ambassadors help serve a 100 percent organic, scratch-cooked meal at Michelle Obama School in Richmond, California, in January. (Photo courtesy of Conscious Kitchen)
To help with staff training, Conscious Kitchen offers sessions on scratch cooking, and the nonprofit is launching a database in August that will allow districts to share recipes. But its most powerful levers for change are its innovations in food purchasing, product development, and distribution.
The Conscious Kitchen Purchasing Cooperative
One key way in which Conscious Kitchen helps schools tackle food costs is through its new purchasing cooperatives, bringing together multiple school districts to issue joint RFPs (requests for proposals) on which organic producers can bid. Higher volume purchasing can increase the schools’ leverage and unlock lower organic food prices. It can also make organic and sustainable purchasing simpler.
The Mt. Diablo Unified School District, just east of San Francisco, is the lead district of 16 in a pilot purchasing cooperative spearheaded by Conscious Kitchen. The district serves about 29,000 students and purchases from 30 vendors ranging from major distributors like Sysco to Mimi’s Organic Farm in Salinas, roughly 100 miles away.
A cooperative that manages multiple contracts on behalf of many districts has the power to be “pretty transformational,” said Alex Emmott, the district’s director of food and nutrition services. “It just makes it easier, more accessible, and then hopefully helps to drive down costs for items.”
The co-op “hits the supply and demand, operational side of things” for the Tahoe Truckee Unified School District, said Kat Soltanmorad, its director of food and nutrition services.
“If I’m looking for organic string cheese, and now there’s 20-plus school districts ordering the same thing, I’m going to get a much better bid price compared to maybe even the conventional,” Soltanmorad said.
Working With Vendors
Conscious Kitchen wants to make organic purchasing work not only for buyers, but also for sellers. It can encourage food vendors to repackage their products in bulk—a 1-pound package of dry goods doesn’t go very far in a school kitchen—or reformulate them to meet federal nutritional standards.
Conscious Kitchen worked with Nature’s Path in 2024 to reformulate its organic cereal to ensure the first two ingredients were whole grains, thus meeting the standards.
“Part of the ability to leverage purchasing is to figure out what the needs are, and then make the products with companies that are already really outstanding in those areas,” Shils explained.
