How to supercharge your school meal program in 5 easy steps

If you’re like most school dining services professionals, you aim to grab students’ attention and motivate them to choose school lunch over a packed lunch. But, creating and maintaining a leading-edge school dining program can be tough without eye-catching images, easily accessible nutritional information, and built-in marketing tools to support it.

Just ask Amanda Venezia. She’s the director of dining services at Londonderry School District in Londonderry, NH, and her digital menu software was holding her back. It couldn’t support the innovative school menus she creates for the 4,200 students across five schools in the district.

She turned to Nutrislice in early 2018 for a digital menu solution that supports her forward-thinking programs and ultimately helps to increase sales and student participation. In fact, the school saw a 1.6% increase in elementary school cafeteria sales within the first three months.

Here are five ways Londonderry School District supercharges their school meal program using Nutrislice digital menu software:

1. Uses time savings to develop creative menus

   Amanda saves significant time by easily adding and editing menu, allergen, and nutrition information directly in the Nutrislice system and publishing them for viewing via website and mobile app. She now spends less time publishing menus and more time developing innovative school meals.

2. Promotes special menus

   When she has a special menu to promote, Amanda simply overrides the menu cycle for one or more days ― just one of the ways she reinforces the idea that “this is not your old school lunch menu anymore”.

3. Offers greater access to nutrition details 

   Now menus can be easily filtered for carb counts, allergens, and other nutrition information via the school website or mobile app.

4. Delivers convenient options for parents

   Parents and students can sign up to receive menus via email each month, pay for student lunches online, and even hear what’s for lunch via Amazon Alexa-enabled devices.

5. Provides important information for healthcare at school

   School nurses now have access to the nutrition and portion size details they need when working with students.