Ingredients for Healthy Schoolkids

Thanks to your support, the new Chef Ann Foundation and Lunch Box websites provide the necessary ingredients that schools need to serve students delicious scratch-cooked meals made with healthy, whole,nutrient-rich food. These are REAL tools for REAL change. They can help school districts stay in budget while meeting the USDA guidelines. 

Some game-changing resources include:

• Recipes and Menus: a revamped recipe database with hundreds of recipes that can be sized up or down depending on how many students are served. They include nutritional analysis, and they’ve all been kid-tested so school food staff can be confident that students will like them.  They sync with the menu cycles offered, which include USDA certification documentation.
• Procurement: a complete menu of procurement tools to help school food service staff transition to fresh foods and scratch-cooking while maximizing their food dollars along the way.
• Management: a whole new comprehensive section of management tools that cover everything from human resources to fiscal planning.
• The Parent Advocacy Toolkit: a detailed step-by-step guide to help parents kick start grassroots change in their districts

Our next step is to get these resources into the hands of school nutrition staff, parents, and advocates, so they can start changing the way we feed our children today!

Some feedback from folks in the field:

"With so many food service professionals are working hard to meet the new USDA nutrition requirements, it's great to have resources like the Lunch Box that can help provide kid-tested menus that schools can use. This is the type of professional support all schools need." - Rochelle Davis, President + CEO, Healthy Schools Campaign

 “I have used many of the recipes from The Lunch Box since starting Good Food for Oxford Schools. As we have begun our transition to a scratch cooked menu and have been bringing in more local foods - the Lunch Box has been our go-to for new recipes such as the roasted broccoli and roasted cauliflower. We needed many new entree options for our menus as well, and love the chicken potpie and stir fries. The recipes are in an easy format for our cafeteria managers to use - they especially love the way the calculator allows them to explode the recipe to a larger size!” - Sunny Young, Projects Coordinator, Good Food for Oxford Schools and Farm to School Oxford School District

Links:

• Chef Ann Foundation Website
• The Lunch Box Website