Brad Blankenship had been working in edtech for nearly 10 years when he noticed that food services—an essential division in any school district—was being neglected.
“There just wasn’t a whole lot of innovation happening” around children’s nutrition services, Blankenship tells EdSurge, especially compared to how rapidly the rest of the education sector was adapting. “I wanted to change that.”
Several years later, in 2015, Blankenship founded TITAN School Solutions, a company that provides cloud-based services around nutrition and meals to K-12 school districts.
Since bringing on its first customer in August of that year, Irvine, Calif.-based TITAN has grown to serve nearly 1 million students across 150 school districts. On Tuesday, the company announced it had raised $5.2 million in a Series A round, with plans to use the new capital to expand its reach in schools nationwide (the majority of its existing customers are concentrated in California and Arizona). The fundraise was led by Wavemaker Partners and Springboard Ventures, with participation from RezVen Partners.
TITAN solutions emphasize efficiency: speeding up food lines in the cafeteria, eliminating inconveniences in paying school meal fees, processing applications in real-time and automating communication with parents.
For example, if a student goes to lunch and remembers their account was running low on funds yesterday, they can quickly pull up the TITAN mobile app (available on iOS and Android) and check their balance. If it’s low, they can text a parent and have money uploaded instantly, Blankenship says.
The software is cloud-based, so while it was built to improve districts’ food services departments—it manages their inventory, accounts payable, accounts receivable, purchasing and point of service—it also benefits the IT departments, Blankenship tells EdSurge.
On the TITAN platform, users can also track the different dishes being served in the food line and analyze the nutritional value against state and federal regulations, he says. It’s a feature that came in handy for schools trying to get in line with the federal Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which was passed in 2010 and established higher nutrition standards for school meals. (The standards, a central part of Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign as First Lady, were rolled back earlier this month by the Trump administration.)
One of the ways TITAN is helping Garden Grove Unified School District is through its real-time information processing, says Agnes Lally, director of food services for the California district.
If a new student enrolls in school at Garden Grove in the morning, Lally explains, their information becomes available in the system almost immediately and they are able to eat with their new classmates by lunchtime.
Garden Grove enrolls about 43,000 students in the district. Its food services department, with 350 employees, serves about 38,000 meals per day, Lally says.
The department has been using TITAN’s inventory system for a few years. In August, it began using its point of service solution as well, after phasing out a system it had been using for the last 24 years. It was an instant improvement for the whole staff, Lally says.
“I am able to get information in minutes, compared to a few hours,” she says. “That’s a lot of time saving for me as a director.”
