Education United States Project #23579

Ingredients for Healthy Schoolkids

A microproject by Chef Ann Foundation

Project Report | Jun 28, 2016
The Impact of Healthy School Food

By Emily Miller | Marketing & Education Manager

Thank you for supporting Ingredients for Healthy School Kids!

We're proud to report that Chef Ann Foundation is now helping over 7,000 schools in all 50 states create healthier food for over 2.5 million school children! Our microproject is now retired but our vision that every child, every day has access to fresh, nourishing food at school is not. Your support has helped further our goal to change the way we feed our children.

Why Your Support Matters

With childhood obesity at an all-time high and 30 million kids eating school lunch every day, children across America need to have access to fresh, healthy food at school. This need is even greater for the 22 million children who come from disadvantaged households that participate in the free and reduced-price lunch program. For them, healthy school lunch might be their only access to good nutrition all day.

The problem is that many schools are serving highly processed, re-heated meals because they lack the cooking equipment, culinary skills, and fresh food procurement experience to cook real food. Your support of Chef Ann Foundation is so important because it's giving school food teams the tools they need to make healthy change and ensure that children are getting nutritious meals every day.

Hear it from the Experts

Recently we decided to ask the experts why healthy school food is so important. Who might those experts be, you ask? Kids! And their answers proved to be very insightful. Check out this video, or read some of the highlights below.

"Healthy school food is important because you can be more active during the day, you can have fun and be fit."

"Kids need school food because they don't always have the money to get home lunch. If they don't have school food and they don't have home lunch, they'll be hungry."

"I'd rather eat healthy food than greasy food. There's a lot of junk food, like food that they serve in restaurants, and probably I could get sick."

"I like carrots and lettuce because they help you think better and you can grow better!"

Thank you again for helping us reach these kids, and thousands more like them. If you'd like to continue supporting our work check out The Lunch Box Expansion Project.

Yours in the school food fight,

Emily

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Mar 30, 2016
Gathering the Ingredients

By Emily Miller | Marketing & Education Manager

Thanks to your support, the 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. CAF provides professional training and technical support to school service staff along with grants to implement cook-from-scratch operations, salad bar programs, and nutrition education activities. 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:

Project Produce: Currently accepting applicaitons is one grant program called Project Produce, which is designed to engage kids of all ages with eating and learning about fruits and veggies, so that foods like broccoli, beets, or black beans end up in their bellies, not the trash.The grant provides $2,500 for schools to purchase fruits and veggies that will be used as part of a school-wide nutrition education activity. These activities allow kids to try new things, which helps them expand their palates and develop healthy eating habits that will stick with them through childhood and beyond.

Nutrition Education: Not only do we offer the fruit and veggie grant, we also have comprehensive how-to guides for many nutrition education activities on The Lunch Box. Whether it’s a simple Tasting, or a more creative idea like a Rainbow Day, a Chef Demo, or even a Junior Chef Competition, The Lunch Box has all the information and tools schools need to plan a successful event.

Recipes and Menus: a 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.

The Parent Advocacy Toolkit: a detailed step-by-step guide to help parents kick start grassroots change in their districts

To date, CAF has ensured that over 2.5 million children have access to fresh, nutritious, healthy school meals. In 2016, CAF we hope to reach 393,750 additional children with programs that ensure they have daily access to scratch-cooked meals made with fresh fruits and vegetables, healthy whole grains, and lean proteins.

You can stay up to date on all of the Chef Ann Foundation's programs and projects by signing up for our newsletters.

Thank you again for helping CAF to nourish the futures of our nation’s school children.

Yours in the School Food Fight,

Emily

Links:

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