Our Food Philosophy
We work hard to ensure that we are serving high quality, fresh and healthy food to our schools. To achieve this, we uphold strict food standards and openly disclose them to the communities we serve.
Appealing and Delicious: We want students to eat our food and to try new things. That’s why we focus on making our meals tasty, fun and interactive.
Variety: We think it’s important to eat a variety of foods – a balance of lean protein, whole grains, healthy fats, fresh vegetables, fresh fruits, and calcium/dairy.
Natural and real: Natural to us means using real food, cooking with few ingredients, and making sure the ingredients we use are recognizable and not artificial.
Home-style: We believe in eating foods that are close to their original state and avoiding unhealthily processed foods.
Right-size, not super size: We offer age-appropriate portion sizes to support kids to maintain and grow into a healthy weight.
Balance: We believe that to combat obesity, students should eat a balanced diet of fresh, whole foods that taste delicious and satisfy kids’ hunger so they aren’t forced to fill up with unhealthy snacks and junk food.
Our Menu Planning Approach
We plan menus to include daily offerings from each food group.
To us a meal is more than just the nutrients it contains - though nutrients are important – we believe the appearance of the entire meal is an educational opportunity to show students what a balanced meal should look like. That includes seeing the fruit or vegetable and the rBST-free milk as part of their experience. In planning our menus, we take into account several sets of standards:
• USDA requirements for school lunches with respect to calories, fat, saturated fat, and other nutrients
• Our ingredient standards: these are the guidelines we use to ensure every product and every ingredient in our meals is of the highest quality.
• Our nutrition standards: these are the nutritional attributes we are committed to providing to ensure that our meals are helping children to fight obesity, diabetes, and prevent other diet-related illnesses.
Our Ingredient Standards (Our Never-Evers)
• NO rBST or hormones in milk and dairy.
• NO Hormones & antibiotics in meat. Our meats are hormone- and antibiotic-free with no animal byproducts used in feed. This kind of meat is referred to in the food industry as “never-ever” meat – it is never ever treated with hormones or antibiotics.
• NO fried food. Our food is prepared fresh daily; we do not serve fried, unhealthily processed, or microwaved food. We do not even allow “flash-fried” products in our meals.
• NO high fructose corn syrup, ever.
• NO artificial trans fats, ever.
• NO artificial colors, flavors or sweeteners.
• All ingredients meet
Whole Foods Market’s stringent quality standards.
Our Nutrition Standards
• We only offer non-flavored milk, and all our milk for K-12 students is 1% or nonfat.
• We strive to offer foods with little or no added sugar.
• Our meals on average contain no more than 30% of their calories from total fat and no more than 10% of calories from saturated fats.
• All of our baked goods (tortillas, breads, breakfast pastries) contain whole grains.
• We offer a variety of vegetables, including dark green and orange vegetables, throughout the week.
• We do not serve juice with our breakfasts or lunches.
• We offer a variety of fresh fruits over the course of a week, and we do not serve canned fruit.
• We offer fresh salads every day.
• We feature low-fat dairy products, in our meals.