...Kidzeum has bean working very hard on a new initiative!

Kidzeum is excited to announce the partnership with Bean Sprouts, a nationally renowned organization with a mission to "spark children's appetites with good-for-you food and to delight parents with a happier mealtime."  Bean Sprouts' core values of positivity, playfulness, innovation, and health, resonate with Kidzeum's goals to provide educational and entertaining hands-on opportunities to promote health and science.

Bean Sprouts approached Kidzeum to partner on a Cafe and Cooking School within the children's museum. Bean Sprouts currently uses this model within several other children's museums, and has achieved significant success in not only attracting additional visitors to the museums, but also perpetuating their missions of making healthy decisions. The first Cafe and Cooking School opened inside the Madison Children's Museum in 2010, and serves as the template for additional cafes and cooking schools, including within Wonder! in the Chicagoland area, the Betty Brin Children's Museum in Milwaukee, Children's Museum of Manhattan, and a cooking school in Los Angeles. 

In addition to the on-site Cafe, Bean Sprouts proposes a Cooking School, utilizing the very successful templates the organization has created and implemented in several other children's museums. Cooking School classes and programs that will be scheduled numerous times throughout a month upon Kidzeum's opening. These cooking classes are geared towards toddlers and grade school children, and allow kids to have fun with food and to explore new ingredients.

 

Each cooking class will welcome between 10-20 participants (based upon age group) to ensure individual attention from the instructor, who is a locally-based employee of Bean Sprouts. The instructor will provide a fun, playful, and educational cooking class experience for children. S/he will prepare all food items and equipment prior to the class, lead a top-notch class for students, and clean up after each class. Each class participant will be actively engaged in activities associated

 

Bean Sprouts has been receiving a tremendous amount of publicity and coverage over the past year.  Bean Sprouts was recently named one of the "Top 100 Movers and Shakers" in the restaurant industry for providing a place for families that is both healthy and fun, and is also the only restaurant to offer homemade organic baby food. The co-owners of Bean Sprouts are experts within the arena of children's health and marketing to improve kid's nutrition: together they wrote Bean Appetit: Hip and Healthy Ways to Have Fun with Food, which has received major national press coverage. Shannon Seip is also the author of Pop Quiz!, If These Boobs Could Talk: A Little Humor to Pump Up the Breastfeeding Mom, and Momnesia.

 

And more specifically related to children's museum's, Bean Sprouts other co-owner, Kelly Parthen, has presented "Is Museum Food Service Causing Indigestion" at the Association of Children's Museums' annual conference. Bean Sprouts recently met with Sam Kass, Senior Policy Adviser For Healthy Food Initiatives (for Michelle Obama's Let's Move! healthy kids campaign) and is working as leaders in the industry to advance the national campaign. In addition, Bean Sprouts has a recurring spot on PBS Sprout, and has been featured on Good Morning America Health, The Martha Stewart Show, Parents Magazine, ABC News, Radio Disney, and Nickelodeon.

 

For more information on Bean Sprouts, please visit www.beansproutscafe.com.