Kitchen can crank out 36K meals per month

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By Kurt Allemeier | Saturday, August 30, 2008 9:55 PM CDT | () comments

Scott County Jail food service supervisor Rhonda Duchesneau shows the new space for the jail’s kitchen, which is scheduled to open in mid-September. (Andrew Link/QUAD-CITY TIMES) Buy this Photo

Big and plenty.

The Scott County Jail’s renovated and expanded kitchen will be able to produce six times more meals than it did when it was built.

The kitchen is tentatively scheduled to be cooking Sept. 18 after contractors finish their work.

With more space and better equipment, the food service supervisor and three full-time workers will have the capability of producing 36,000 meals a month when the kitchen reopens in a couple of weeks after being closed as part of the 1983 jail’s renovation.

Built to produce 6,000 meals per month, 22,000 meals per month were being made in the kitchen before it closed in August 2007.

“We kept growing and growing and growing,” Major Cliff Tebbitt, jail administrator, said.

Food services supervisor Rhonda Duchesneau is pleased with the improved kitchen, reminded of the cramped quarters she and the other kitchen workers cooked in.

“We were tripping all over each other,” she said.

The county is paying $14,000 per week for contracted food service from Hy-Vee. The sheriff’s department must provide at least one week notice that it is severing the agreement. The price per meal is expected to drop from $2.33 to $1.10, Tebbitt said.

“We anticipate seeing some savings,” Sheriff Dennis Conard said. “We are not certain what it will be.

“We are looking at a lot more prisoners, so we will have to buy a lot more food.”

Inmates seem pleased to be getting meals made on site. That is because they will get two hot meals a day, instead of one like they are receiving now, Duchesneau said.

“Inmates that have been back and forth,” she said. “We get comments about how glad they will be to go from once a day to twice a day.”

The larger kitchen will also allow the sheriff’s department to restart culinary vocational programs that had been halted, Tebbitt said. Duchesneau said 10 inmate workers have been requested, up from six when the kitchen closed last year.

“We’ll have plenty for them to do,” she said.

Kurt Allemeier can be contacted at (563) 383-2360 or kallemeier@qctimes.com.