Written by Rob Levine
My daughter Arielle had her first day of kindergarten this week. Parents were invited to stay in the classroom through circle time. As I sat cross-legged next to my wife on our portion of the magic circle, I listened to morning announcements with a renewed sense of interest…not as a parent, but as a food marketer. You see, I have spent a good portion of the past thirteen years of my life working with manufacturers to sell food and beverage products into school lunch programs. And while I’m well versed in federal and state guidelines, including bread equivalents, whole grain requirements, commodity programs and menu cycles, I have not looked at school lunch from the vantage point of the important gatekeeper audience—parents.
For the first day of school, Thunder Hill Elementary offered Popcorn Chicken with a Whole Grain Roll and Veggie Pizza as a meatless alternative. I had to chuckle. I could easily guess the manufacturer of each of those items. They were good, high quality products.
In our orientation packet we were offered the opportunity to prepay for a full year of lunch for less than $500. For less than $3.00 per day, we wouldn’t have to think about lunch again. We would also have the comfort of knowing that if Arielle eats on the full week menu cycle, she will be meeting carefully calculated government requirements from a health and wellness perspective.
We still declined. The 8 ½” x 11″ folded program pamphlet that they provided us was dry, boring, quoted USDA guidance and used terminology foreign to people not well versed in school foodservice. Plus, we had our own experiences to overcome including green hot dogs on St. Patrick’s Day, an attempt at Chinese Food and the much-derided Meatloaf Monday. Sadly, there was also an unfortunate stigma attached to school lunch, particularly if you had a “lunch ticket,” which meant that either your parents prepaid for the week, or you were on a subsidized free and reduced lunch program.
Inevitably, each year our agency is asked by clients to provide an overview of school foodservice. And each year, participation is a key concern of K-12 School Foodservice Directors. Government funding of free and reduced lunch is tied to total student participation in the program. In effect, the district and underprivileged children benefit from the participation of students that pay full price for school lunch. And yet, there is an entire segment of dual income, professional, middle- and upper-class parents who could benefit from the ease and value of a school lunch program, but choose to brown bag each day.
The questions that the districts have to ask is: Have they made the program attractive to this segment? Have they positioned it as a viable alternative that they can feel good about? Have they helped them to understand that the programs have evolved since our elementary school days in the 1980s?
My sense is that if some type of effort were put into packaging, positioning and promoting the program to “parents like me,” directors and students would reap the benefits with increased participation.
