High school culinary and management teams from Columbus are using experience from state and national competitions to pave the way to careers in the food industry.
Teams that are filled with culinary students in the Columbus Area Career Connection C4 program at Columbus North High School traveled to Rhode Island in April for the National Pro-Start Invitational.
The Columbus culinary team placed first among 27 teams and its management was the first team among competitors at the state level to earn the right to represent Indiana in the nationals.
Chef Carrie Douglas, who has advised the C4 teams for 11 years, said that although she has had four management teams and two culinary teams advance to the National Restaurant Association ProStart Invitational during her career, she has never had both teams advance together.
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“It doesn’t happen. The same school doesn’t win both categories,” Douglas said. “There was just a tremendous amount of pride knowing we would be the only school representing Indiana.”
Once there, the culinary team placed 35th of 46 teams at the national level, and the management team placed 39th out of 46 teams.
By the end of the competition season, members of both teams had collectively been offered about $50,000 in scholarship money to attend various colleges, Douglas said.
How it works
Competition is based on a restaurant scenario, with the culinary team focusing on cooking and preparing dishes and the management team working on the operational side of owning a restaurant.
Ultimately, six students made it through tryouts to earn spots: two for the management team and four for culinary.
CSA New Tech junior Larah Henderson and Columbus North senior Brittany Roberts made up the management team.
The culinary team consisted of Columbus North seniors Arlette Cambron and Sean Sharp, and Hauser seniors Yulisa Palomino and Rachel Hopkins, who recently graduated.
Roberts said taking part in the competition, in which she had to explain restaurant plans to judges, gave her more confidence in speaking.
“I joined because it put me out of my comfort zone,” she said. “It made my weakness into a strength.”
Henderson, who was the only junior on either team, has participated the past two years.
“I do track for Columbus North, so my schedule is really busy,” Henderson said. “But I love the C4 class. This will be my third year taking it. It’s a lot work and you really have to commit to it, but I wouldn’t trade it.”
The skills the students performed in nationals took months of preparation to develop.
For the management team, this meant creating a detailed conceptual restaurant called The Meadows Cafe, complete with blueprints, a marketing strategy and estimated return on investments.
Alongside them, the culinary team practiced knife skills and a recipe chosen by Douglas, to which the students could make small adjustments over time.
“She (Douglas) would give us suggestions, tell us what it was about so we could learn new skills,” Cambron said.
Scholarship rewards
The practice paid off when both Columbus teams earned first prize at the March 9 Indiana ProStart Invitational in Muncie. Apart from the satisfaction of winning, teams earned scholarship rewards.
This was especially important for three seniors who will be using those scholarships at universities this fall.
Palomino is using her reward money to complete a culinary arts program at Vincennes University. She will earn her associate’s degree there before moving on to get her bachelor’s degree elsewhere.
“I started at the beginning of the year struggling with money situations and how to actually pay for college,” Palamino said.
Placing first at state also meant that both teams would represent Indiana the following month at the National ProStart Invitational in Providence, Rhode Island.
There, the teams performed the same tasks as at the state competition, but refine them utilizing feedback from the state judges.
“We look at the areas we need to improve on and strengthen them up,” Douglas said.
For Roberts, practicing her presentation with her partner “a hundred times a day” was the key to overcoming the anxiety of competition.
Unlike the state invitational, however, the crowd was larger and stakes higher at nationals.
“We were very nervous,” culinary team member Hopkins said. “We had a lot of people watching and there were constantly judges walking around.”
In addition to the experience of competition, the invitational is an opportunity for students to advance their future careers by networking with other participants and potentially winning larger scholarships than at state.
“You had one team supporting the other and it was always fun to watch them become this really cohesive unit,” Douglas said. “
The teams did not place high enough at the national level to earn additional scholarships, but Palamino said that the real reward was sharing the state victory and nationals experience with her teammates.
“I’m very proud of how it turned out,” Douglas said. “They gave it their it all, put in their time, and that’s all you can ask.”
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The National Restaurant Association’s ProStart program is a national two-year high school competition that seeks to bridge the gap between education and the food service industry.
Winners of state competition advance to nationals, where more than $1 million in scholarships are awarded.
More information can be found at https://chooserestaurants.org/npsi.
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