Can a phone app encourage more kids to eat a school lunch?

SAN FRANCISCO — Can letting students preorder their cafeteria lunch using a phone app get more kids to eat school food? How about offering more places where they can pick up their meal? Or maybe having school staff promote the idea that school lunch is cool?

All of these ideas, and many more, are part of San Francisco Unified School District’s Future Dining Experience, a multi-year effort designed to get more kids to eat healthy school meals.

Thus far, media coverage of the Future Dining Experience (FDE) has been a gushfest, but not based on any kind of data showing that more kids are eating school lunch as a result of the FDE. Instead, stories have relied on praise from folks like Sandy Speicher, a partner at IDEO, the firm that developed the FDE plan with SFUSD, to pitch the idea that a redesign of the cafeteria is all it takes to get more students to eat healthy school meals.

Grant will track FDE impact

All that will be changing soon, as the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources’ Nutrition Policy Institute and UC Berkeley School of Public Health recently received a nearly $2 million grant from the USDA to study the Future Dining Experience. For three years, researchers will examine its impact on the number of students choosing school lunch, as well as its effect on plate waste (food students dump in the garbage), the amount of fruit and vegetables students consume, and obesity. They will even determine whether the FDE generates enough extra school meal revenue to cover its own costs.

The grant is sponsored by the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), which is funded by Congress and focused on finding solutions to problems including food security, food safety, and child obesity.

Just as one must take with a grain of salt much of what passes for “research” in the food world, (e.g. – a study funded by the American Beverage Association implying diet soda is more effective than plain water for weight loss; a study funded by the peanut industry attributing most peanut allergies to parents not feeding their infants enough peanuts), one should also cast a skeptical eye at glowing reports from IDEO staffers on the “success” of the IDEO-designed Future Dining Experience.

Media reports misleading

Some articles even claimed the FDE has already solved all of the problems it tackled (although of course offering no proof to back up those claims.) This May 2014 article in the digital architecture and design magazine designboom portrays FDE concepts like take home dinner kits, communal dining at elementary schools, and a community kitchen, as already happening, when in fact even now, a year later, they are still just ideas on paper.

Redesigning cafeterias to make them more pleasant spaces for student dining is an important part of the FDE plan, and has been the focus of much of the media coverage. But the truth is, with just one SFUSD cafeteria having received its planned FDE makeover (with two more in the works for completion this year), there is no way to know if the redesign is accomplishing its goal.

Despite the fact that the Roosevelt Middle School cafeteria unveiled its new appearance in October 2014, the school district has yet to publicly release any data on whether more Roosevelt students are choosing school lunch now, as compared to last year with the old cafeteria design.

But the UC study won’t be focusing on the bond-funded Roosevelt cafeteria remodel, instead looking at the less costly, quicker-to-implement concepts of Smart Meal technology (allowing students to preorder school lunch on their phone), multiple points of sale, and staff promotion of school meals.

With no dog in this fight, the UC researchers will be able to give a clearer sense of whether the Future Dining Experience is able to live up to its hype.

24 schools to be studied

Researchers will track data from a total of 24 SFUSD schools (12 middle schools and 12 high schools) divided into two groups. One group of 6 middle and 6 high schools (called “intervention” schools) will employ some of the concepts presented in the FDE plan; the other group of 6 middle and 6 high schools (the “control” schools) will not employ FDE strategies.

Project Director Kristine Madsen told me:

“We will gather data over two years with 12 schools using the interventions and 12 control schools not using them, and then in a third year, continue to study both groups of schools, but in the third year, the control group will also implement the interventions (total study time 3 years.)

“We are just starting our ‘baseline’ data collection, measuring plate waste in all 24 schools, administering a student survey, and collecting data on school meal participation. We’ll collect the same measures in the spring of 2016 and 2017 (comparing changes in these outcomes between intervention and control schools), and then again in spring of 2018 in control schools only, to see if they also show change after getting the intervention.”

It will be refreshing to finally see some assessment of this project based on data, rather than the speculation, opinion, and incomplete information on which most Future Dining Experience articles have been based.