Centralized Kitchen Boosts Production for a Texas School District

When United Independent School District in Laredo, Texas, built a centralized production kitchen in the late 1990s, it had 20-some school buildings within its boundaries. Today, the district serves about 40,000 students from pre-K to 12th grade across 44 campuses. To help scale food service production to meet current and future needs, the district approved a $52 million bond to build a brand-new facility on Laredo’s east side.

“You can imagine doubling your size and students and still having to produce out of the same facility,” says Richardo Solis, an architect with Able City Architecture, which partnered with Foodservice Design Professionals, a design firm based in Texas. “The district was utilizing the space they had as best they could and did magic with what they had, but they really needed a new facility. Only they were landlocked, so they just couldn’t expand.”

The new Child Nutrition Center is 35,000 square feet and produces 40,000 to 65,000 meals per day. “This facility is the centralized kitchen for the entire district,” Solis says. “It also houses offices for not just their child nutritionists, but their entire administration department and maintenance staff.”

The entire facility was designed with future expansion in mind. “The cook-chill area is the heart of the center, and we have three cook-chill systems … with room for a fourth, should the district grow again,” Solis says. Redundancy also was a careful consideration. “This facility needs to operate all the time; they just really can’t afford any downtime,” Solis says. “Even on the electrical side, instead of having one large generator, we have two that operate in tandem with one another. If one goes down, there’s enough capacity in the other one to keep operations going.” Dry storage and freezer space were also doubled compared to the previous facility.

The center’s layout was designed around the flow of product coming in and out on a daily basis. “In the dock area, there’s receiving and distribution: They bring all the product in, and they store it in the storage warehouse and freezer,” Solis says. Next, employees bring the product into the production area, which includes an ingredient prep area, bakery, vegetable prep area and cook-chill zone. “There’s a lot of neat equipment to help them be as efficient as possible,” Solis says. “In the bakery, they have a huge walk-in proofer and two large mixers … for preparing cookies and breads for the entire district. Once product is done, it flows out from there, and we have some assembly coolers where everything gets packed to be shipped off to the different campuses.”

Large mixers, ovens and a proofer make up the bakery, which turns out cookies and breads for the entire district.

One of Solis’ favorite parts of the center is the student instructional area, as well as the adjacent test and catering kitchens. “The instructional area essentially serves as their (staff) cafeteria, but they do a lot of school tours, and they use this as a home base, and they have a big projector (for presentations),” he says. A roll-down door separates the instructional area from the test kitchen and nearby catering kitchen. “They can open it up, and there’s a serving bar with hot and cold wells where they can serve the food they’ve made and (diners) can look directly into the test kitchen and see what people are doing,” he says. “They have the flexibility to be able to not only provide food for the district as a whole, but also be able to cater their own internal events and to provide food for staff.”

Able City and FDP started working on the project in 2022. Construction was completed earlier this year, with production up and running in time for the 2026 fall semester. “We have been working with FDP for many years, and this is probably the biggest project we have worked together on,” Solis says. “They are very thorough and very professional, and were able to work hand in hand with the district’s child nutrition department to make sure what they were getting was what they wanted.”