Archer students integrate food into the typical school day, like advisory snacks, the Snack Shack and the treats that typically accompany any special event, such as the donuts and cookies at the club fair.

“I love how people bond over [food] at Archer,” freshman Gabby Wolf said. “No matter what grade [you’re in,] you can go up to someone and ask, ‘Do you want donuts?’ and they’ll say ‘Yeah, I want donuts’ and then you’re friends.”

As part of the campus master plan, a kitchen is due to be finished spring of 2019. However, some students don’t know much about what the kitchen will provide.

Chief Financial Advisor Jane Davis told the Oracle that a variety of foods with a “focus on nutrition” will be served once the kitchen opens.

“[The kitchen will have] hot food, cold food, there will be a salad bar [and] breakfast food,” she said. “There will be a froyo machine, there will be snacks and there’ll also be beverages.”

The building will be divided into a cafeteria, where students will go to get their meals and snacks, and a kitchen, where the food will be prepared.

“There is also a possibility that the kitchen will be used to teach about cooking skills and the importance of nutrition and healthy eating,” Director of Operations Janet Lyon said.

Wolf said she doesn’t know much about the kitchen and what food it will offer, but she knows what kind of food she hopes to see.

“[I would like to see] good food, but not to the point where it’s gourmet,” Wolf said. ” [I’d] like burgers, pasta, and a salad bar and smoothies.”

The Food Vendor Committee, which is composed of students, faculty members, and teachers, will make recommendations about which vendor should supply the kitchen based on taste tests.

Junior Abigale Lischak is an executive board member of Archer’s Community for Sustainability and worked with senior Ella Frey to compile guidelines to ensure vendors’ sustainability. She and Frey are a part of the committee that tastes the various food options.

‘We watched the presentations from the different food vendors,” Lischak said. “We were looking at how sustainable each vendor was.”

Lyon and Davis have been focusing their work on planning and directing the construction of the kitchen building. They have started visiting different schools to investigate what food service programs would best work at for Archer’s kitchen.

“Ms. Lyon and I have worked together for a long time,” Davis said. “This is the most fun project that we’ve worked on.”

Along with all of the food options inside of the kitchen, Lyon and Davis spoke about the possibility of an app that would provide information about the food options’ nutritional value and ingredients. The app would help students with dietary restrictions select food that they can eat safely.

“ [There will be] a focus on nutrition and providing students and parents, with the touch of an app, to see, ‘Hey, what’s in this food? What ingredients what food allergies do I have to be concerned about? What is the nutritional value of what I’m eating?” Davis said.

For now, Lyon and Davis will continue to research and use the information they gather to further improve and build upon the features that will be part of the new kitchen.

“We’re all excited because it’s something we’ve not had here and we very much wanted to have,” Lyon said.