For the past two years, MySchoolBucks and Heartland School Solutions has provided Growth Grants to school nutrition programs across the country. To date, we have awarded over $100,000 to districts who use MySchoolBucks and helped over 130 food service departments promote their nutrition programs in fun and creative ways, using funds they might not otherwise have access to. In addition to offering our food service Growth Grant program for the 2019-20 school year, we are excited to offer for the first time Growth Grants for before & aftercare programs! 

Every day across the United States, approximately 500 million plastic straws make their way into landfills. That's enough used plastic straws to circle the earth 2.5 times or fill 46,400 school buses. Scientists estimate that it can take hundreds of years for a single plastic straw to decompose. With that in mind, many schools and student-led organizations across the country are looking to reduce or eliminate plastic straws on campus and in their communities.

Every year we offer free MySchoolBucks materials so districts can share the benefits of online payments with parents. To make sure we're providing the best marketing resources to districts, we surveyed over 90,000 parents to learn more about how they receive school communications and used this information to grow our offerings!  
 

With all new designs, the school menu templates are back! These new 2019-20 school menu templates will be sure to liven up lunchtime and help you prepare for the new year.

School cafeterias serve millions of meals to students each day. And as the end of the school year approaches, so does the uneasy task of collecting unpaid student meal balances.

 
Lunchtime is often considered crunch time for school food service staff - for more reasons than one! Serving meals quickly and efficiently, while also making sure students have time to eat, can be a challenge for many schools. That's why any feature or method that can help speed up your serving lines, even by a few seconds, can be monumental.

One school district in Northern California found that simply using audio messages at their Point of Sale stations helped to increase their line speed and satisfaction among the students.

On Friday, May 3, food service professionals will be celebrating the 7th Annual School Lunch Hero Day. This day provides the perfect opportunity to recognize those individuals who work so diligently throughout the year to serve nutritious and delicious meals to our students. The impressions they make on each child that comes through the cafeteria is remarkable.

That's a great question and likely one that many nutrition programs may not be able to answer. It’s estimated that K-12 schools throw away roughly $1.2 billion dollars worth of food each year! One study found that K-12 schools in Minnesota generated 483,520 lbs. of waste in a given school day and the most prominent category of items filling up the trash cans was food waste.

Your point of sale is the center of your nutrition operation during serving periods. With an average lunch period lasting only 25 minutes, students want to get through the line quickly so they have time to eat and chat with friends.

While there are many adjustments you can make to speed up your serving lines, optimizing your menu boards can also help shave a few precious seconds off the time it takes to enter a transaction.

Here are 8 tips for building menu boards that help make your cashier's job easier and your lines move faster:

How great would it be if you only served foods that your students loved? Not only would it boost participation and sales, but it would also help reduce food waste. Although this is an admirable goal, figuring out what students like can be difficult. This is where cafeteria surveys can help.