Daniel Ovanin has spent the last seven years building the culinary infrastructure behind Salute Hospitality's Air Force operations. He oversees menu development, nutrition programming, and culinary training across 14 bases. He also established the Culinary Council, a platform that develops senior chefs into multi-unit leaders while keeping standards consistent across every base in the portfolio. We talked with him about what it takes to feed a mission-ready force at scale, and why the work goes well beyond food production.
Who is actually cooking the food?
Airmen. With one exception, a civilian-operated Space Force location, the airmen are the cooks across every Air Force dining facility. Some have had professional kitchen experience. Many have not. Some have never held a knife before they arrive.
That makes our chefs educators first. The role goes far beyond menu execution. Our chefs teach knife skills, sanitation, production technique, recipe adherence, and nutrition fundamentals. They provide the ongoing culinary training that the Air Force's basic school doesn't cover in depth. For most of these airmen, Salute is their continuing culinary education.
You manage nutrition standards across the entire Air Force portfolio. What does that look like operationally?
Everything starts with Go for Green and the layers we build on top of it. Beyond the green, yellow, and red classification, we code every item for sodium levels and display calories at point of service. We add Fuel for Function to connect each choice to an outcome. We also apply Healthy for Life standards across the menus, which is the American Heart Association's set of evidence-based nutrition guidelines for balanced, healthier eating.
At the zone level, the requirements are precise: at least 30% of items per zone must meet green criteria, and salad and fruit bars must hit a 50% green minimum.
What is Go for Green?
Go for Green is the Department of War's nutrition classification system, used across all branches of the military. An algorithm evaluates every menu item and assigns it a green, yellow, or red designation based on nutritional composition. Fried items are automatically red. The system weighs fat-to-calorie ratios, trans fats, and overall nutritional balance. It is managed through HPRC (Human Performance Resources by CHAMP), the public-facing program of the Consortium for Health and Military Performance, which supports total force fitness: physical, mental, nutritional, and social.
What is Fuel for Function?
Fuel for Function is an Aramark-built program that sits on top of Go for Green. Where Go for Green tells you what is nutritionally sound, Fuel for Function tells you what it does. It helps a diner standing at the line make an informed decision based on the outcome they are after: strength, energy, recovery, or overall well-being. A green item is a good choice by the numbers. A Fuel for Function item connects that choice to a purpose.
About 90% of Fuel for Function recipes meet green-level criteria. Sodium or other factors can sometimes shift an item to yellow, but the standard is high. The layer matters because younger airmen often haven't had much exposure to performance nutrition before entering service, so we can't assume that knowledge. We have to build it.
How do you execute against those standards at scale?
Across breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midnight service, we manage roughly 400 recipes daily across the portfolio. Every recipe is coded for nutritional compliance: Go for Green classification, sodium, calories, and Fuel for Function alignment. There's no room for error when those standards are Go for Green requirement.
The menu development cycle runs about three months from start to execution. We conduct multiple training calls with chefs and general managers at every stage: recipe adherence, nutritional accuracy, Go for Green coding, Fuel for Function alignment. Recipes are vetted and standardized. Teams execute to the spec; they don't improvise away from it.
What is the Culinary Council?
I established the Culinary Council last year as a development platform for our senior chefs. We have five chefs from across the country, and we meet every two weeks.
The council evaluates menus, recipes, and execution. Because every dining facility operates from the same core menus and concepts, we have to balance regional preferences and local availability against operational consistency across 14 bases. The council is the mechanism that makes that work: reviewing what's landing well, what needs adjustment, and what can scale.
At the same time, the council is a leadership development platform. Most of our chefs come from single-unit backgrounds. Military dining at this scale requires multi-unit thinking: the ability to evaluate a program across locations, identify system-level issues, and develop solutions that hold up at every base, not just your own. That's a different kind of thinking, and it has to be developed deliberately.
How do you serve a population with varied nutritional awareness and different preferences?
You have to meet people where they are. Taco Tuesday and Wing Wednesday, the lines are out the door. Comfort food is part of the culture.
The job is to offer healthier options clearly, build the education over time, and use choice architecture to make the healthy choice the natural choice. Every plate display highlights green-coded items. Sampling, merchandising, and positioning all shape what people reach for, even if they're not consciously running nutritional math.
What changes is the context. Headquarters bases like MacDill have heavier civilian and officer populations with different dietary habits and expectations. Training and operational bases skew toward active-duty airmen who are often younger, physically active, and in the earlier stages of building nutritional habits. Florida coastal bases like Patrick skew toward retirees. The menu is consistent, but how we present it has to account for who's in the room.
You support multiple dayparts, including flight-line operations. How does that shape the program?
Lunch is our highest-volume daypart. Breakfast is strongly egg-focused, with omelets as the consistent top seller. But midnight service is its own program: for some guests it's their first meal of the day, for others it's their last, so we blend breakfast, lunch, and traditional entrees to serve both.
We also operate POD locations near flight lines. A POD, or Provisions On Demand, is a satellite service point positioned near the flight line that brings a condensed menu to maintainers and pilots who can't get to the main dining facility. Same standards, smaller footprint. The goal is to make sure no one in the mission cycle is without access to a performance-focused meal, regardless of where their work takes them.
Grab-and-go and Heat and Eat options extend that further. Someone finishing a long shift who needs a meal they can take back and microwave later shouldn't have to choose between convenience and nutritional quality.
What does mission readiness mean from where you sit?
Dining facilities are mission-essential operations. That's not a marketing frame. Without adequate nutrition, performance degrades. Recovery slows. Cognitive readiness suffers. Poor nutrition doesn't just affect how someone feels. It affects what they can do when it counts.
Our job is to make sure that connection is never a point of failure. That means consistent standards across every base, every daypart, every menu cycle. It means chefs who understand that training an airman to make proper gravy is part of building a capable, ready force. It means a Culinary Council that keeps the system sharp and the people in it developing.
The work is culinary. The outcome is readiness.
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Daniel Ovanin is Senior Executive Chef for Salute Hospitality's Air Force portfolio. He established the Salute Culinary Council and leads menu development, nutrition programming, and culinary training across the Air Force dining program.
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