As schools aim to provide a healthy and balanced diet for their students, dietitians play a crucial role in ensuring the school lunch program runs smoothly while keeping up with the changing trends and regulations. With so many students to manage, there are a number of common challenges that may be faced along the way. We spoke with a dietitian to learn about some of the biggest challenges and a few ideas to help you overcome them.
Regulations and nutrition guidelines
School dietitians face the challenge of keeping up-to-date with ever-changing regulations and nutrition guidelines. Meals must meet all health and safety guidelines while providing a balanced diet for students. Not to mention, you want the meals to be interesting so that your students actually want to eat the lunch provided.
Ensuring your program utilizes a menu planning solution designed for K-12 helps dietitians build meals that are compliant with the latest standards. Menu Planning solutions have comprehensive reporting tools to assist with nutritional analysis. Many systems also come pre-loaded with a variety of compliant recipes from the CN database.
Managing allergies
With allergies on the rise, it's essential for school lunch programs to cater to students with allergies and ensure that the necessary precautions are taken to prevent allergic reactions. This means staying up to date with each student's restrictions and being able to provide them a well-rounded meal despite these limitations.
An advanced point of sale system can provide vital support in managing student allergies, such as alerting cashiers when a student is purchasing a meal that contains an allergen. Managers can seamlessly update allergens on student accounts easily within the system so cashiers always have accurate information. Cafeterias can also use their digital menu boards to denote which items contain allergens or which ones are friendly for specific diets.
Addressing the needs of dietary restrictions
You may also face the challenge of varying dietary restrictions. Diets like vegetarianism and veganism continue to be on the rise, and that includes for school-aged kids as well. With this comes another challenge of making sure there is food available for everyone regardless of their diet and ensuring they are provided with adequate nutrition.
Sharing an online menu of planned meals with parents helps to increase transparency and inform students in advance what meals they may be interested in. You can easily mark which items on your menus are friendly for specific diets, like vegan or gluten-free.
Creating interesting menus for everyone
Providing a diverse menu that caters to students from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds can be a unique challenge for dietitians, as they need to ensure that meals are culturally appropriate while meeting nutritional goals. It provides a great opportunity to offer more unique or creative meals, but the challenges arise in making sure you still adhere to the USDA guidelines.
Utilizing digital menus can provide students a chance to rate or react to items on the menu, to help you understand what are their favorites and what’s most popular within your schools. A point of sale system with comprehensive reporting can also offer you a view into what students are purchasing most often in the cafeteria.
Dietitians face a considerable challenge in ensuring they provide healthy and tasty meals while catering to students' dietary needs. By using innovative technology solutions, and thinking outside the box to get your students engaged, dietitians can successfully overcome these challenges and make school meal times more exciting and enjoyable for the students.
