The next food startup could begin in high school — if teachers get the training
Story by Misty Bouse, photos by Photos By Ric Getter
hosts the Career and Technical Education Summer Skills Summit, which is a paid professional development series for local teachers like Scott Farquhar of Sherwood High School and Kristi Moe of Century High School in Hillsboro.
At first, it looked like a cooking class. Then the teachers pulled out calculators.
Inside Oregon State University’s Food Innovation Center in Portland, 14 high school educators spent a Thursday turning marinara sauce from a kitchen recipe into a production formula. They weighed ingredients, calculated yield, tested flavor and learned the food science behind what makes a product shelf-ready. The lesson was about more than sauce: and Portland Area Career Technical Education Consortium (PACTEC) are trying to make sure career and technical education keeps up with the industries students may enter after graduation.
It was part of a new session of the Career and Technical Education Summer Skills Summit, a paid professional development series. For Melissa Buechler, a culinary arts teacher at Liberty High School in Hillsboro, the value was both practical and personal.
“These professional development classes allow me to not only learn new skills to take back to my students, but the cross-curricular relationships between teachers across districts are invaluable,” Buechler said. “We get to collaborate in small groups in ways that wouldn’t likely happen otherwise.”
The free-for-educators session, held at Oregon State University’s in Portland’s Pearl District, focused on culinary arts and food product development. It was the second of nine summit sessions offered individually this summer across programs of study, including culinary arts, AutoCAD and surveying, irrigation systems, cybersecurity, project management, multimedia, project-based learning for career and technical education, a welding workshop (now full), and STEAM Lab design process and mass prototyping (now completed).
PACTEC CTE Summer Skills Summit
PACTEC’s new CTE Summer Skills Summit is a paid professional development series designed to help high school teachers bring current industry practices back to classrooms. PCC’s PACTEC page describes the summit as a new summer opportunity for educators to learn from instructors, gain industry skills and return with classroom-ready curriculum. The program reflects a larger statewide push to make CTE more connected to employers, regional economies and student pathways after high school.
The need for teachers to keep up is growing.
Oregon is expanding CTE: said CTE concentrators, students completing two or more credits in an approved CTE program, graduated at a record 97.8%, and the number of Oregon CTE programs grew from 1,038 in 2021-22 to 1,125 in 2025-26. And Business Oregon identifies food and beverages as a target industry, with nearly ; it also notes the industry’s importance to rural Oregon and its diverse workforce.
An estimated 125 area teachers will participate in nine workshops in the PACTEC series through the summer, when it concludes with an irrigation systems session at the Rock Creek Campus on Aug. 14, and enrollment is still open. PACTEC supports rural, suburban and urban high schools throughout the Portland region, including Washington and Columbia counties. The consortium helps expand career and technical education and brings state grant support beyond what any single district could provide.
Katrina Stein, PACTEC Industry Liaison at PCC, said the summit also strengthens the educator community.
“This session is for teachers to take skills back to their schools and classrooms,” Stein said. “(For this session) we had 14 instructors learning industry-level food skills like scaling up recipes, seeing the latest equipment and technology, and the marketability of food. We believe that bringing together our teaching community with experts in the food industry is powerful for such a foodie city like Portland.”
The culinary workshop was led by Sarah Masoni, director of the Product and Process Development Program at the OSU Food Innovation Center, a collaboration between OSU and the Oregon Department of Agriculture.
Her experience in the food industry includes quality control and assurance, research and development, and product scale-up. She also helped pioneer PCC’s “Get Your Recipe to Market” course, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary.
“Culinary is about intuition. Food is art. It’s color on the palate: Does it taste and look good? It’s about quality elements, as chefs are like directors of a movie,” said Masoni, who has been teaching culinary mastery for more than 30 years.
Portland sustainable agriculture and culinary teacher Kelsey Madison from McDaniel High School practiced food safety and engineering.
For the morning exercise, teachers gathered in a focus group room where blind studies were conducted as part of bringing new food products to market. Then they moved into a food preparation area, where they converted a kitchen recipe into a production formula before scaling and preparing marinara sauce in four versions: regular, sweet, spicy and garlicky.
“The teachers were divided into four teams representing versions of marinara,” Masoni said. “They had to do the math calculations and accurately weigh and measure ingredients to work on their unique batch and prevent yield loss. That consistency is to optimize quality and maximize a product’s profitability.”
For food safety and food engineering, attendees learned how OSU conducts pH, Brix and water activity testing. Instruction also included a flavor science presentation, demonstrations and a sensory activity.
Melissa Buechler — the Liberty culinary arts teacher — worked on the sweet marinara team. She said the math was intense, especially when scaling up ingredients and tasting for appropriate saltiness and sweetness. Summer professional development, she added, is part of her annual routine.
From left, Katrina Stein watches Hillsboro School District culinary arts and hospitality teacher Melissa Buechler of Liberty High School along with Moe scaling their winning team’s sweet marinara recipe.
“We have more than 200 students in Liberty’s culinary program, and I look forward to introducing new knowledge and career possibilities to them,” Buechler said. “Our students are talented and focused. Some are entrepreneurial, and I’m here to get them excited and lead them.
“One such Liberty student is a pre-nuclear engineering major headed to OSU,” she added. “He’s put his knowledge of chemistry into making tasty, high-protein, low-sugar cookies. I’m helping with his commercial pitch to get it market-ready.”
For more information about PACTEC professional development opportunities, visit .
About Misty Bouse
A public relations specialist, Misty Bouse has been working in college advancement for a decade. A graduate of University of Oregon, Misty has worked as a managing editor for BUILDERNews Magazine and as a contribu... more »