District pilots preorder option at high school

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina rolled out a remote order option at one of its high school sites last November as a pilot to test its impact on meal participation. 

“We want to get it down pat before we [introduce] it anywhere else,” offers Catherine Beam, executive director of school nutrition services for the district. “It’s really kind of a new concept for us, so we’ve been trying to get our feet on the ground and work with one school and one group of kids to see what the kinks were.”

The reason for the experiment is simple: cultural and demographic trends that are pushing the convenience and customer-friendliness of remote ordering.

“I really feel like that’s the way retail is going—you can order your McDonald’s food online now and someone will bring it out to your car,” Beam explains. “That’s what our kids are used to in the real world and we’re trying to see if we can make that work for us in school.”

The online choices so far have been limited to a set menu with a single daily entrée option plus a choice of fruit, milk, juice and condiments, but is expected to expand to more choices going forward, says Beam. The choices are somewhat distinct from the regular serving line menu, she adds.

“There are some different salads that we don’t normally have on the regular line, and we’re doing a deluxe hoagie sandwich we call a meat lover’s hoagie,” she explains. “We’re also doing some smoothies over there, which we don’t have on our regular line. Those have been the biggest hit and they work really well for us because they can be made a little bit in advance.”

The most common comment from students, Beam says, is “My food is ready when I get there, so I don’t have to wait in line,” so “if we can grow that, I think we’ll be going in the right direction because high school kids do not like to wait in line.”

The meals all have the components necessary to qualify for reimbursement under USDA regs. Garinger High School in Charlotte, where the program is being tested, is a CEP site, so all students qualify for receiving free meals as long as they meet the federal guidelines. The next site when the pilot expands later this spring will be just the opposite, a low-poverty high school with high cash sales that will test how the preorder option appeals to that kind of population. That site will also test the program’s ability to deal with individual payment, a non-factor at the CEP site.

The preorder option has now been available for about three months, minus winter break time, and participation has slowly been creeping up, Beam reports, from just a handful in the early going to up to 80 orders a day more recently—“rumor had to spread first,” she laughs.

Garinger has an enrollment of about 1,700, so there’s plenty of room to grow. Its regular lunch program offers four serving lines plus an a la carte line.

The pickup point for the preorders is an old dish window that was no longer being used. Decorated with graphics to make it look like a food truck on the customer side, it opens out from a former dishroom area of the production kitchen that was modified with production equipment.

“What I also like about [the preorder pilot] is that we are using space that was just sitting there doing nothing to create something really neat,” Beam suggests.

The online preorder platform being used is the one available from digital menu services vendor Nutrislice. Students can order up to 48 hours in advance, with a cutoff for each day’s lunch at 9 a.m. that morning.

“For me I believe it’s innovative and starting to move in the right direction even though it’s on a very small scale right now,” Beam says. “Hopefully, it’s something we can grow there [at Garinger High] and also grow into.”