Food service company to open Greenville HQ in Landmark Building

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Joe Urban is revolutionizing school lunches with his innovative program, School Food Rocks.

The self-described “life-long chef and restaurant guy,” is a passionate advocate for nutritious and delicious meals for K-12 students. His company provides consultation, training and inventive solutions to school districts around Greenville County to enable them to create heathier, more appealing menus for students.

Urban recently signed a lease for 2,000 square feet of space to operate his food-service consulting company in downtown Greenville’s Landmark Building.

Urban, who describes himself as a product of the restaurant industry, said his first job was peeling garlic for a chef every day. “I worked my way through restaurants that my father owned, or partly owned and learned from a lot of chefs,” said Urban, whose father encouraged him to consider running a restaurant when he was older.

Urban continued learning the ropes of the food industry while in college, by managing a national pizza franchise.  He later moved to Florida where he owned and operated a chain of ‘50s-themed diners in the central part of the state.

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Later, he and his wife relocated to Greenville where she worked as an administrator for Greenville County Schools and he worked as a Food and Nutrition Services Director. “I spent 16 years there and recently left on January 31 of this year to focus on the business full time,” he said.

An advocate for healthy food options

When you hear Urban talk, you begin to understand how used his position to not just simply churn out 85,000 meals a day, but also to advocate for providing students with healthy food to help them perform at optimal levels. Urban disputes the notion that fresh is always more expensive.

“Our programs were required to be financially self-sufficient from the school district itself,” he said.

During his time at the district, Urban rejected canned and frozen fruit and pre-packaged vegetables, opting for fresh instead, making one exception: unsweetened applesauce. “The elementary school kids really like that,” he said.

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And for grains, Urban reached out to a baker in Greer to produce items like rolls. He also saw to it that nothing but certified Angus beef was served. “We were the first and only school district to be licensed to do so,” he said, adding that sustainably caught wild Alaskan seafood and other high-quality proteins were also on the menu.

Presentation is also important to Urban. “We required our food service workers to not only follow recipes, but also make sure that the food was displayed a certain way as to be presented well,” he said, adding that the result really resonated with the children and the parents as well, who were suddenly excited about school meals.

How School Food Rocks built its brand

Urban said that as a person who has been building the brand for the past decade, (he is on all the social media channels), he had initially resisted running a podcast.

“I finally gave in to the pressure and did it and was surprised that our episodes consistently high for popularity,” he said, adding that the word is getting out that his company can take existing and new schools through the steps needed to revamp, or create their respective meal programs. “We are there to help them from the time they put the shovel in the ground, to the time they feed the students, providing culinary training, designing new kitchens, providing assistance with improving the skills of the staff and advising on procurement,” he said.

Urban also works with food manufacturers to develop new products and different ways to use them for the K-12 market.

As for the Greenville headquarters? Urban saw opportunity.

“We had a unique opportunity to take an underutilized location and turn it into a really innovative training center that contains a large kitchen, along with a 25-seat dining room and a 25-seat conference room,” said Urban, adding that week-long culinary training will run the gamut, from tips on running a  quality kitchen, to food safety and knife techniques for scratch-made meals and how to present those meals in a way that’s appealing to customers.

Urban plans to open in the Landmark Building by May 1.

“We anticipate school districts coming from around the country to train their staff and elevate the quality of food served in their districts and are really looking forward to it,” Urban said.