WASHINGTON — The Center for Advanced Professional Studies (CAPS) Network may offer an opportunity for the wholesale baking industry to introduce the industry to younger generations as a potential career path. At the Nexus of Baking conference, held Oct. 1-3, Nate Clayberg, business and industry director, CAPS Network, and Jennifer Lindsey, chief marketing and digital officer and chief transformation officer for Corbion, shared the opportunity the CAPS Network offers both baking and supplier companies looking to connect with high school students around the world. 

The CAPS Network is profession-based experiential learning available to high school juniors and seniors at school districts that have partnered with a CAPS program. Currently, the CAPS Network has 115 programs reaching more than 170 school districts across 24 states and four countries. The CAPS Network aims to fill in the gaps between industry, higher education and trades and connect them with high school students who may not know what career opportunities exist within their own communities. 

Lindsey has worked with the CAPS program connected to the Blue Valley School District in Johnson County, Kan. For 15 years she’s worked with the program, initially connecting with Joe Whalen, an instructor and curriculum developer at the Blue Valley CAPS program, who asked her to tell him more about the workforce gap she was seeing in the food industry. That lead to Lindsey and Whalen working together to develop an experiential-based curriculum, called the Future of Foods. Developing that curriculum only took six months and Lindsey estimates she put in 10 hours of her own time.

“He did the heavy lifting,” Lindsey said. “I connected him to others in the Kansas City food industry: retail grocery stores; Shatto, a small dairy; Seaboard Foods, a pork producer; other ingredient companies in the area; and K-State because it’s that ecosystem that kids needed exposure to, and we developed the course that we call The Future of Foods.” 

Lindsey said many of the students who enter the Future of Foods program don’t understand what they’re signing up for. They are expecting a cooking class and get food science. The curriculum teaches students about the food industry, food science and safety, and it constantly evolves based on student and industry feedback as well as shifts happening across society so that the curriculum remains relevant. At the end of a semester, students have to complete a capstone project where they develop a new product and pitch the prototype, business plan and break-even analysis to a panel of judges from the industry. 

“Many of the university food and bakery science programs are struggling to get the numbers up in their programs,” she said. “Sometimes Joe has four students in a class and sometimes it’s 14, but for the 24 semesters (when it’s been taught), every kid who walks into that class doesn’t know about the industry, and every one of those 24 semesters, there’s been at least one student who has gone into food science or bakery science. Imagine if we could scale that as an industry?”

Each individual CAPS program offers what are called strands for students to explore. At Blue Valley, food science is one strand, but there are five additional strands: medicine and health care, teacher education and law, engineering, bioscience, and business technology and media. 

In addition to connecting students to industry and exposing them to technical skills, CAPS also teaches them durable skills: professional communication, conflict management, public speaking, critical thinking, etc. They learn how to fail and try again. They learn that product development is messy and challenging, Lindsey said. 

Industry professionals can work with CAPS to develop a curriculum that suits their needs, tap into a program that already exists, come in as a guest speaker or provide mentorship to students. As Lindsey pointed out, all it takes is a conversation.

“It doesn’t matter how remote, how urban, how small or big the school is,” Clayberg said. “There are opportunities to get these students immersed in what actually becomes a workforce retention program. You’re exposing students, their friends and even their parents to your industry.”

Lindsey and Clayberg showed on a map how many CAPS programs were already operating next to bakery and supplier companies attending Nexus, revealing multiple active programs within an hour of cities like Kansas City; Minneapolis; and Dallas. But interested companies can also work with programs remotely or work with CAPS to establish a new program. 

“It just starts with a conversation however you choose to leverage this,” Lindsey explained. “What if as an industry we build out a bakery science program or engineering or supply chain. Imagine if we did five and then 15 and then 20 bakery science programs feeding into our universities and then the feeder that would create into the industry?”