Bedford, PA – The Beef Checkoff’s Northeast Beef Promotion Initiative (NEBPI) launched their Beef and Veal in the Culinary Classroom grant program earlier this month. The grant program, which provides monetary support for post-secondary culinary classroom to provide ‘above and beyond’ hands-on learning opportunities in the classroom with beef and veal, is funded by beef farmers and ranchers through the Beef Checkoff program. Additional program support comes from the South Dakota Beef Industry Council.
The grant program is available to post-secondary culinary programs and schools, vocational technical schools or career & technology center high school culinary programs, and food bank culinary training kitchens.
Grants are intended to offer culinary students educational opportunities that center around beef cutting, cookery, nutrition, and overall food safety.
Examples of such beef lessons and experiences include, but are not limited to sub-primal or primal cutting demonstrations that ideally pair with cooking lessons utilizing the fabricated cuts from the cutting demo, cooking lessons highlighting the various properties and cooking attributes of beef muscles, cooking contests/competitions among students to encourage innovation recipe development or mastery of challenging skills.
The 2023- 2024 grant program was able to award 15 schools across eight states (RI, PA, CT, DE, MA, NY, ME, and MD) within the Northeast region with funding to help cover the cost of beef or veal in their culinary classrooms. The program is set to reach over 600 students this academic year and will provide students with resources and materials that they will be able to use throughout their culinary career.
Kristen Braccia Hufnagel a culinary instructor at Bullard Havens Technical High School in Connecticut says, “The grant allows us to teach the students about beef and veal at greater length and gives us the opportunity to purchase cuts of beef we would normally not be able to purchase. It is extremely valuable to myself and my students!”
For more information about beef promotion in the Northeast region, visit www.nebpi.org/.
Stay connected with the Northeast Beef Promotion Initiative Facebook and Instagram pages to catch up on how the Northeast region is actively seeking to promote beef.
For more information, visit NEBPI.org or BeefBoard.org
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The Beef Checkoff Program was established as part of the 1985 Farm Bill. The checkoff assesses $1 per head on the sale of live domestic and imported cattle, in addition to a comparable assessment on imported beef and beef products. States may retain up to 50 cents on the dollar and forward the other 50 cents per head to the Cattlemen’s Beef Promotion and Research Board, which administers the national checkoff program, subject to USDA Approval.
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