kajun,
I agree with foodpump on a couple of points. The first is Sysco's control over your menu. I don't trust them much and consider them the Walmart of food service- driving the small guys out of business a lot like the chains are doing to independently owned restaurants. (my apologies to those of you who've had good experiences with them) Aside from my personal feelings about Sysco, I've found that the prices creep up on items that seemed to be such a good deal the first time the salesman quoted them, so to be locked into a menu created by a salesman, would make me leery.
I've had great results with cambros, too. They are wonderful for keeping food hot, but lousy at holding crisp items crisp. They'll be hot, but soggy! Often when we do outside weddings where there is no access to a kitchen, we have to cook the food here and transport it to the site. There it may be held for 2 hours.
I supply a small college with most of the food they sell in their cafe as they don't have a kitchen. Their menu is the following: baked goods, cold sandwiches, soups that they hold in electric soup tureens, and individually packaged entrees that can be microwaved. Is it possible for your charter school to purchase some equipment such as soup tureens? If so, soups and sandwiches would be a lunch option that most kids would like anyway. Other days, you could deal with the logistics of transporting hot food.
I'd give it a couple of months of working out of the existing kitchen-maybe by having an overnight shift to do prep- before committing to renting or subcontracting.  |