AUBURN — Auburn Public Schools is the leading partner in a new U.S. Department of Agriculture grant announced Wednesday.

The grant comes through a shared effort with a Brunswick-based nonprofit, Full Plates Full Potential. The agency was awarded a $7.4 million federal grant to bring Maine produce into the state’s school meals and build a sustainable presence for local farms.

As a part of this, Auburn Public Schools will be receiving $623,970 to establish a food processing hub within the combined school districts of Auburn, Lewiston and Lisbon.

“Maine as a state produces so much out of our fields, out of our oceans, and the vast majority of it leaves the state to be processed and consumed,” Justin Strasburger, executive director at Full Plates Full Potential, said. “The pandemic showed just how fragile our supply chains can be.”

While Auburn School Department’s nutrition director could not be reached for comment Thursday, Strasburger was able to share some of their plans.

“Auburn is focused on the processing and distribution,” he said. “When it comes to working with local ingredients, a big challenge for schools is that they need to connect with local providers.” The project aims to have these connections in place by 2027.

“Schools need to get the actual ingredients into their school, so there’s a distribution challenge. And then from a processing perspective, not all schools are equipped to do on-site processing,” Strasburger said.

“Getting a whole butternut squash is different from getting one that is pre-cubed,” he said. “In the greater Lewiston-Auburn area, this project is focused on creating a centralized hub to help add efficiency to that. Auburn could do some on-site bulk processing and be a centralized hub to receive the product and the distribution mechanism to get it out to the area schools, manage the ordering and procurement process of all of that.”

Once realized, the project will add some efficiencies of scale and expand the purchasing power of the individual schools in working with local farmers and producers, Strasburger said.

The Auburn School Department’s other partners will include Lewiston Schools, Lisbon Schools, Healthy Androscoggin, the Good Food Council of Lewiston-Auburn, Cultivating Community, St. Mary’s Nutrition Center and Blackie’s.

“I think the more we move in this direction, it’s good for our state, it’s good for our environment, it’s very good for our students and very good for our producers. So, really just a win for Maine,” Strasburger said.

Faith Owen twists up bags of school lunches Sept. 29, 2020, in the kitchen at Thomas J. McMahon Elementary School in Lewiston. Children could take home a week’s worth of lunches, which were available to all, regardless of family income. Andree Kehn/Sun Journal

More student involvement will be a key part of the project, which may include having students take part in taste-testing different dishes and menu planning.

“One of the challenges we have with school food is you typically have a very small budget and you need to prepare food at scale, but you have to balance having food that is healthy and appealing to kids, which should also meet all their dietary needs, and religious needs, and things like that,” Strasburger said. “We’ve been doing a big push to make sure that students are involved because they are the end user.”

While an executive plan remains to be finalized soon, the project is expected to run through the 2027-28 school year.

“Our goal is just to get kids eating healthier, and our argument is that local is always going to be healthier. Local food is going to have less preservatives (in it). It’s going to be typically less processed. It’s stuff that has traveled much less time to get to one’s plate, either from the field or the ocean,” Strasburger said.