District’s Energy Packs deliver variety while cutting costs and waste

Meal solutions that meet federal National School Lunch Program (NSLP) requirements, are cost-friendly and that kids like are the Holy Grail of school nutrition departments. At Lakeside USD in California, a combo meal approach called Energy Packs that combines various popular items has elevated participation levels while cutting costs and providing flexibility.

As planning for the 2015-2016 school year got underway at Lakeside USD, Child Nutrition Director Sally Spero had a problem. She wanted to offer a daily vegetarian option, lower program costs, offer choices young children would find attractive while also easily adapting meal program offerings to meet the growing requests for gluten-free options.

She also wanted to have food options that compared to popular commercial offerings students were bringing from home, as well as entrees that could meet the NSLP’s two-grain/two-meat standard.

Yogurt with sunflower seeds and crackers

“During the previous school year I had offered a whole-grain bagel and an 8-ounce carton of yogurt each day and it was obvious this was not working,” she says. “It was our highest cost entrée at $1.25 and was not very popular with average daily sales of 53. It was monotonous and didn’t change.”

It wasn’t particularly popular with custodians, teachers or noon duty aides either as “the bagel-eaters discarded the yogurt and the yogurt-eaters discarded the bagel, which led to a lot of food waste and trash,” Spero says.

So she began to make a list of all the cold vegetarian two-meat entrees and two-grain side dishes she could possibly offer that met NSLP standards. It included cottage cheese, sunflower seeds, graham crackers, yogurt, beans and tortilla chips among others.

“As the list grew it occurred to me that some of these could be sold together, such as pairing a package of sunflower seeds with a 4-ounce container of yogurt, but I wanted to package them together so the students would be sure to get a complete meal.”

For the packaging she looked at what the district was already buying and came up with a carton used for middle school chef salads, “and suddenly Energy Packs were born.”

Nacho bean dip with cheese cubes and tortilla chips

Spero worked with her staff to design the specific meal combos. One of the first decisions was to add a third item in order to have a more attractive presentation. After a number of days of experimentation (and calls to vendors), a number of Energy Pack choices were developed. They included cottage cheese paired with crackers and apple slices; yogurt with sunflower seeds and crackers; string cheese with marinara sauce and crackers: and nacho bean dip with cheese cubes and tortilla chips. A color printer was used to make attractive labels.

“Even better news for me was the cost of the Energy Packs,” Spero notes. “By choosing the items carefully I was able to reduce my overall cost down to 72 cents (which includes the cost of packaging), a whopping 42 percent reduction. These savings allowed me to add the two additional labor hours it takes to assemble the Energy Packs daily and still come out with lower overall costs.”

And by subbing an alternative like rice cakes for the crackers in the Energy Packs, the meals are made gluten-free for students who require that special consideration.

“The cute, simple packages have turned out to be very popular with our students,” Spero says. “They enjoy being able to mix, dip, dunk or combine the items in the Energy Packs to their own use. This has shown up in our participation figures for this segment of our menu, which now average 155, a 66 percent increase, [and] because the students now consume the items in the Energy Packs the food waste and trash has also declined.”

Contact Mike Buzalka at [email protected]

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