New England Schools Go Wild with Recipe Contest

The Abbey Group is a food service management company providing 40,000 (less now with Covid-19) school meals a day across New Hampshire, New York, Vermont and Massachusetts. They offer a school nutrition program that highlights local/New England ingredients, quality meals and great customer service. To that end, the Abbey Group started including wild blueberries into its menus and marketing programs. And, they switched to all scratch-made salad dressings for their fruit and vegetable bar and included this delicious and easy-to-make Wild Blueberry Vinaigrette recipe.

After visiting the Maine wild blueberry fields, Scott Choiniere, Executive Vice for the Abbey Group, was looking for a fun way to introduce delicious, healthy, anthocyanin-filled Wild Blueberries onto school menus as part of his “Buy Local” program. He decided to hold a wild blueberry recipe contest to get this team excited and inspired about the special little berry from Maine (that packs a big taste and powerful nutrition) in fun, creative and kid-pleasing recipes.

Each participating school won a $50 gift card for the kitchen staff to use towards equipment, uniforms, promotional materials, or other wish list items. The school nutrition directors came up with some incredible recipes. If you have frozen wild blueberries from Maine in your freezer, give these recipes a try or check out our wild blueberry school recipe library. 

Winning recipe: Cambridge Elementary School – Maple Balsamic Wild Blueberry Pizza 

“We did a maple balsamic wild blueberry pizza. This was a BIG hit amongst students as well as staff and is requested on a regular basis. We love working with fresh, local and wild grown products as much as we can,” said Kelly Shortsleeve, Chef Manager at Cambridge Elementary School.