Portage College recently appointed Paul Pelletier as the new dean of food sciences, and he said he is thrilled to move into the completion stage of the project after 12 years of involvement.
“I think, for me, I’ve been working on this for something like 12 years or more, and I finally see the whole thing coming together as a package. And the impact that this campus can have on St. Paul and the surrounding region is enormous, it provides an opportunity here to bring that quality training closer to home,” Pelletier said. “Our goal is to provide an exceptional learning experience and that is certainly what we’re shooting for.”
Over the past number of years Pelletier has been at the forefront of the development of the food sciences program, and he said it is a great feeling to be appointed as dean.
“It’s just a continuation of basically what I’ve been doing anyhow. A lot of the duties that I’ve been doing to date really reflect what a dean does anyhow, so the college felt it was maybe time to make it official.”
Retrofitting will begin at Portage College on July 2, with the current completion date set for March 31, 2014.
“We have the blueprints pretty much finalized. Of course we’re short of money, the costs are higher than anticipated so we’re going to focus our attention on getting all of our processing bays up and running,” he said.
While the food sciences program is set to be completely underway for the start of the 2014 fall semester, Portage College has plans to offer an institutional cook program as early as September of this year.
“The institutional cook is designed to prepare cooks for institutions like hospitals, seniors’ lodges and camps,” said Pelletier. “The nice thing with that course is that it prepares them to do volume cooking with high nutritional value, but not necessarily on the artsy look of how it’s plated. It’s really on the nutritional, dietary requirements in lodges and hospitals. It’s a very important portion of the culinary arts.”
He added that as retrofitting goes on at the campus, the school plans on renting out the kitchen at the Rec. Centre as an extension of the nearby campus.
“To launch the institutional cook program, because we don’t have an internal kitchen, we’re renting a commercial kitchen. We’re looking at renting the Rec. Centre kitchen, which is right across the street from us anyhow so it’s a good fit. We’re going to use that kitchen to start with until our in-house kitchen is ready.”
Other programs that Portage College will be offering come September 2014 include a culinary arts diploma program and a food processing technician program.
“The food processing technician is really designed to prepare our learners to work in food processing environments at all levels,” he said. “The first year would be learning the sciences of food processing, and then the second year would be heavily leaning on the management capacities of operating these facilities.”
Portage offered a number of one-day special interest courses this school year, and Pelletier said that the college plans on expanding on the idea for next year.
“We’re trying to develop a whole host of more programming like throwing in interesting ones like gluten-free courses, identifying gluten-free and how to deal with it. Also cheese making is high on the list,” he said.
