How two Pueblo East students crafted an award-winning snack with Colorado ingredients
Two students from Pueblo East High School didn’t expect their recipe for breakfast bites to win a statewide award and be distributed in kitchens throughout their school district, but that's exactly what happened.
Jennifer Hernandez, a senior, and 11th grader Yasmin Venzor crafted what they call “East Side energy bites” from local ingredients, which many of their peers at East got to try for the first time from a free breakfast cart on April 25. The students received support from their teachers, district administrators and the Pueblo Food Project to craft the tasty, nutrition-packed morsels.
This is the first time in recent years that a student-developed recipe is going to be adopted by other schools throughout the district, said Dana Elkins-Greene, the director of nutrition services for Pueblo School District 60. Elkins-Greene said other schools in the district will likely start serving the breakfast bites to students during the next school year.
“Students made this and it’s for students,” Hernandez said.
How the students crafted the recipe
Hernandez said that she and Venzor were inspired by a recipe they found online, but they modified it to use local ingredients and to adhere to food nutrition standards from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The energy bites, which are slightly smaller than a golf ball, are crafted with oats and sunflower butter to provide structure, with chia seeds and flax seeds adding fiber and other nutrients. Colorado honey, white chocolate chips, dried cherries, cranberries and vanilla give a splash of sweetness to the bites.
The students crafted the recipe to enter in the “food innovation” category of the Family, Career and Community Leaders of America state competition. The category this year was to craft a new snack for teens.
“We thought the oatmeal energy bites would be not only tasty and healthy, but also innovative because you don't really see them a lot,” Venzor said.
The two students won the category at the Colorado FCCLA competition and are preparing to present their recipe at the national competition in Seattle this June.
“The odds were against us but we pulled through, both of us, and we did it,” Hernandez said.
'Most schools don't have the students doing that'
Venzor and Hernandez started testing the recipe in smaller quantities but made hundreds of energy bites with their fellow catering students to prepare for wider distribution at East Thursday morning.
Some of their peers gave them critiques on earlier batches — for example, they swapped out raisins for dried cherries in the recipe.
The oats, dried cherries and honey the students use have come from southeastern Colorado. Also, the Pueblo Food Project provided a grant for buying local ingredients this spring.
“That's one of the big themes of sustainability: it's good partnership,” said Kelly Gehlhoff, a community advocate with Pueblo Food Project.
Savannah Box is the director of operations for Southwest Foodservice Excellence, which has been the nutrition provider for Pueblo D60 since 2021. Box said that the students analyzed the cost of making the energy bites and it was already under-budget — and buying in larger quantities tends to be less expensive.
Elkins-Greene said that the collaboration between culinary students and the broader food service program in the district helps engage students and create collaboration, something that isn’t always possible because of the stricter regulations for district-wide food distribution.
“In the end, (students) are the customer, right? Of course, we always want to serve things that they actually want to eat. This doesn't always happen, but it can get repetitive so having new things every now and then help shake it up,” Elkins-Greene said.
Kristen Garcia, a junior at East who has tasted previous batches of the energy bites, appreciates how the “homemade” bites add healthy variety to routine breakfast items.
“It's very cool because the students are doing that — most schools don't have the students doing that,” Garcia said.
Anna Lynn Winfrey is a reporter at the Pueblo Chieftain. She can be reached at awinfrey@gannett.com. Please support local news at subscribe.chieftain.com.
This article originally appeared on The Pueblo Chieftain: Pueblo East students' healthy breakfast bites win Colorado competition
