By Sharon Abercrombie
Staff writer

Justin Gagnon has a business plan brimming with health and ecological sustainability: “Change the way kids eat — one kiwi or tangelo at a time.” And then make sure they remember to compost the peels and the dishes.

Trevor Olofson, a fourth-grader at St. Theresa School in Oakland, selects an item while his sixth-grade brother, Scott Olofson, waits his turn. Their mom, Chris Olofson, is the Children’s Choice lunch coordinator at their school.

Gagnon, 30, is fulfilling that plan as co-owner of Children’s Choice, a school lunch program that makes healthy food available at 20 elementary schools in the Oakland Diocese as well as 60 other East Bay and South Bay schools. Ten more private and parochial schools in the Long Beach-Orange areas of southern California have signed on for next year.

What could be more sustainable than moving children away from the poor nutrition/obesity fast track while being good to Mother Earth, asks Gagnon, a Danville native and member of St. Raymond Parish in Dublin.

Gagnon re-launched Children’s Choice, his caterer parents’ small school lunch program, in 2003 with two friends he’d met while participating in the University of Notre Dame’s glee club.

Gagnon and his buddies, Keith Cosbey and Ryan Mariotti, expanded on Larry and Mary Gagnon’s original sandwich-based school lunch service by adding a selection of healthy; low-fat hot entrees made with organic produce and naturally raised beef and chicken.

Besides four hot dish choices available each day, there are eight cold entrees, plus a wide variety of fruits, vegetables and healthy drinks.

The new Children’s Choice began with four schools, gradually expanding to over 80. “It’s a big hit. Our parents love it,” said Debbie Beltrane, school secretary at St. Lawrence O’Toole School in Oakland. Her school signed on this past school year with 80 families participating.

At St. David School in Richmond, where 60 families participated, Ann Pires, principal, lauds the program for its convenience. “Nothing has to be dealt with at the school level.”

Parents, in consultation with their kids, order meals on-line a month in advance, paying an average of $4.45 per lunch. If a child is ill, a parent can e-mail that very morning by 9 a.m. to cancel lunch.

Most participating families order the hot lunches on an average of two to three times a week. Among the yummy choices are herb chicken with oven roasted potatoes and organic zucchini, (cut into kid-friendly bite-sized coins), beef enchiladas, green salad, fresh fruit, Southwest BBQ chicken salad with lettuce, jicama, and sweet corn, and bow tie pasta with baby veggies.

Meals are delivered piping hot each day in one of Children’s Choice’s cheerful red and white trucks. The service maintains kitchens in Danville and San Jose and has 42 employees who work as kitchen staff, administration, outreach educators and truck drivers.

The company moves beyond cooking and delivering food, into educating children and their teachers about the environment and recycling. “It really made us look into our trash,” said Chris Olofson, a parent at St. Theresa School in Oakland.

Children’s Choice business team, from left, Justin Gagnon, Ryan Mariotti and Keith Cosbey, stand in front of one of their trucks ready to deliver hot lunches to elementary schools in the Oakland Diocese.

Olofson said she sees a third advantage to the program. “It’s a nice school recruiting tool that can appeal to busy working moms,” who don’t have to pack a lunch every day, she said.

While at Notre Dame, Justin Gagnon and his two future business partners never anticipated that they’d one day be gustatory heroes to kids, their moms, and the earth. Gagnon studied management information systems. Mariotti focused on chemical engineering. Cosbey juggled double majors in computer application programming and piano performance.

Three years after their graduations, the friends were busy building their respective careers in the corporate world. But they discovered they were tiring of the grind. There had to be more life sustaining work someplace, they thought.

The “someplace” emerged when Gagnon’s dad said he’d pay the trio’s air fare to the East Bay if they’d help him design a web site for his new school lunch program. Soon they realized that feeding children and helping save the environment could becomethe right livelihood for them. They formed a business partnership with the senior Gagnons. A revived Children’s Choice was the result.

Justin Gagnon comes from mixed French and Italian ancestry. His grandfather, Paul Gagnon, owns a restaurant in Martinez. Large, festive family dinners were part of his growing up years. So was helping to pick cherries. But most of the luscious fruit ended up in his and his four siblings tummies instead of the baskets, he recalls.

Gagnon’s interest in environmental sustainability peaked during his senior year at Notre Dame when he took a class on consumerism. “The professor was fantastic. He probed us to really reflect on the impacts of over-consumption in our lives, our planet and our future generations,” Gagnon remembers. The class studied a recently published book, “Fast Food Nation,” by Eric Schlosser, which explored food and its marketing to children.

“This was before Schlosser became a widely known spokesperson for the sustainable food movement and before the work sustainability was even commonplace in our vernacular,” said Gagnon. “The class really got me to think deeply about our association with food and the driving factors behind the food choices we make, as well as the local and global impacts of the choices at both a societal and environmental level.”

Ryan Mariotti sees his work with Children’s Choice as the result of his growing up in Arizona. An avid backpacker, “I remember the oft-espoused ‘take only pictures, leave only footprints,’ mantra of expedition leaders, and the frustration that often came when witnessing the lack of respect that some outdoorsmen would show by leaving trash and destroying trails.”

Mariotti said he spiritually refined his reverence for the environment while attending a Jesuit high school in Phoenix and later at the University of Notre Dame.

“My science and engineering studies opened my eyes to the larger-scale offenses to our planet and installed a sense of needing to do something. The astronomical probabilities which produced our human-inhabitable earth are so small and yet why can’t we care and cherish this one gift from our Creator?” he asks with fervor.

Mariotti’s ecological bible is Alan Weisman’s “The World Without Us,” a work “which has contributed to my perspectives on how our actions now might affect future generations.”

A self-proclaimed obsessor about energy, Mariotti has been reading everything he can about the history of petroleum and large scale renewable energy plans. His work at Children’s Choice reflects his commitment to ecology. He has done away with paper by setting up web-based ordering. He found a company to develop compostable packaging for Children’s Choice meals. His current focus is nudging local counties and waste management authorities towards better composting techniques.

As a kid, Keith Cosbey’s food tastes were cultivated by his mom’s delicious cooking, especially her homemade chicken noodle soup. After he left home in Buffalo, New York, for college, Mrs. Crosby often showed up with her pressure cooker in tow, to bring a little taste of home to the South Bend campus.

The future business team met when they joined the university’s glee club. Throughout their four years at Notre Dame, they would eat dinner together after evening rehearsals five nights a week. Sharing those meals built community. Food and community, Cosbey believes, is “more nourishing than a meal alone.”

Those beliefs helped carve his present position at Children’s Choice as director of community relations. He sees his mission as developing lasting relationships with each school and all of the kids.

Cosbey, who lives in Walnut Creek, has not abandoned his music major. Also a member of St. Raymond’s, he is vocal director of the teen choir and music director of the annual musical. He teaches a Confirmation class and is the youngest member of the pastoral council.

Justin Gagnon lives in Walnut Creek with his wife, Allison, and their baby daughter, Grace. Cosbey and Gagnon sang in the choir at the September dedication of Oakland’s Cathedral of Christ the Light.

Ryan Mariotti and his wife, Colleen, live in Lafayette, and are members of St. Perpetua Parish.

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