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Schools can make small changes to help your child select better lunches and enjoy them more. This approach is freely available to schools as the Smarter Lunchroom movement. 
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1. Be a Smarter Lunchroom |
2. Score Your School |
3. Spread the Word |
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Here's how to help your child's school become a Smarter Lunchroom.
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How's your school doing?
This shows how it can improve.
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Use this flier, FAQs, and letter to let your PTA and the school know where to start
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You can also use ta similar idea to get your kids to eat better at home.
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After finding the perfect middle school and watching students eat lunches for a week, we isolated ten changes we could easily make for less than $50 total that would probably help them eat better without even realizing it--things like changing the location of the fruit, giving fun names to healthy foods, moving the cookies behind the counter, putting the vegetables first, and so on. The food service director and producer were cool with the changes, so we got to work.[18] Twenty-five kids were hand-picked to be secretly filmed by three hidden cameras. We hid cameras in a ceiling tile, a hat, and even in our fake water bottle. Everything was set--and then came the catch. We were asked, with the cameras rolling, to predict the sales for each food item. |
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What didn’t work was putting the cookies behind the counter. We thought this would decrease sales by 30 percent, but it did nothing. Even worse, we predicted that moving vegetables to the front of the line would increase sales by 11 percent, but it instead dropped by 30 percent.[20] What happened?
A little bit of sleuthing showed that cookies were the cafeteria’s big “destination food.” They were five inches of hot, freshly baked gooey goodness--the main reason some kids ate school lunch. Wild horses couldn’t have pulled these kids away from the cookies without pulling them away from eating lunch there altogether. The vegetables were a different story. As I mentioned, our lab studies showed that lunchgoers were 11 percent more likely to take whatever vegetable they saw first compared to whatever they saw third. Well, that’s true when three vegetables are in the middle of the serving line, but here we put them in the front of the line. Nobody scoops up a plate of green beans and then looks for the entrée that goes with it. People pick out the entrée and then the vegetable. They didn’t want to take a veggie until they knew what they were having for a main course. |
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To help schools figure out how smart of a lunchroom they are and what they can do next, we’ve designed a do-it-yourself Scorecard that lunch ladies, parents, or students can use. All it takes is the pdf Scorecard to the right, a pencil, and a lunchroom. Each lunchroom can get as many as 100 points, because there are 100 tasks or changes that help kids choose better and eat better. The more changes your school makes, the higher the score. Most schools first score around 20 to 30, but can quickly move up to 50 within a couple weeks if they really focus.
These are all research-based changes we have found help kids make smarter choices. A school that got a 75 last year will probably get about a 75 this year if they haven’t made any changes or if they haven’t backslidden. School lunch ladies -- food service managers -- like this because many are naturally competitive and because it specifically strokes them for what they’ve done right, and it specifically gives them a menu of the other things they could do to become an even smarter lunchroom. These changes are the common ones that will benefit all schools. Since 2009, we’ve worked directly or indirectly with over 20,000 schools, and every time we go into a new school we find unique changes that will have a huge impact in that school but won’t be broadly applicable. The 100 most common changes can all be found in the Scorecard, but some of the others are more unique to your school. So how do you discover those mysterious, subtle changes that may perfectly fit the needs of your school? After you make some of the more basic changes and feel good about how things are going and are ready for the next challenge, go stand with the kids in the front of the lunch line and ask yourself, “WWMcD?”
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Make Your School Lunchroom Smarter
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What Would McDonald’s Do?ake a visit to a high school cafeteria and then to the nearest McDonald’s. After taking former fast food managers into three schools, we asked them what they did differently. Most changes could be made over the weekend for little or no cost.
Looking at a school lunchroom and asking, “What would McDonald’s do,” may seem too crass or too contrary to how we believe our kids should eat. But who knows better how to give people what they want?[25] We need to have a new model to think of how things could be. Nobody makes more diners happy each day than McDonald’s. It’s not about what they serve. It’s about how they serve it. © Slim by Design, 2104 (Chapter 6) |
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The Lunchtime Report CardThe only worse school day than Vaccination Day is Report Card Day. It’s the day to face the music. While Tiger Moms are obsessed with this day, some other parents don’t care as much., and kids mostly care in relation to their parents. Report cards are a way of checking in and reminding both kids and parents how the year is going—the good, the bad, and the ugly. What if it there were lunchtime report cards?[27] What if every Friday, parents got an email telling them what their little angels bought for lunch that week? It would tell which of their kids bought cookies and Gatorade and which one bought apples and white milk. As with real report cards, you can imagine that some parents couldn’t care less, and others would lose sleep over it. Some parents might care more about what the kids are eating, and others might care more about how much they’re spending. But would it change what kids order? |
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There’s a story of a mother who’s trying to get a whiny, belligerent son off to high school in the morning, but the son kicks and screams that he doesn’t want to go because all the kids hate him and make fun of him, and all the teachers nag him and think he’s dumb. When his mother pleads, “But you have to go to school,” he says, “Give me one good reason.” Mom replies, “Because you’re the principal.” Aside from the principal, no school employee gets beat up more than the school lunch lady. She’s gone from being the punch line of hairnet jokes to being played by a dirty-dancing, Karaoke-singing Chris Farley on Saturday Night Live. Now she even has her own $10.95 action figure.[37] The Lunch Lady Action Figure wears heavy black-rimmed glasses and a blue, 1950s Chris Farley-size dress. She has the forearms and calves of a Nebraska linebacker and is armed with her secret weapon: a serving spoon shaped like an ice cream scoop. |
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How can schools get kids to eat more fruit and vegetables?
How can I make my child's school lunchroom healthier? What's an example of a Smarter Lunchroom makeover? How can schools get kids to waste less food? Is there a solution to banning chocolate milk? How do lunchroom staff get Smarter Lunchroom training? Can healthier concession stands make money? Can Smarter Lunchrooms work in company cafeterias? |
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