Modernizing makes a difference in Meridian, Idaho - Celebrating 40 Years of School Lunch

Food and Nutrition, Oct, 1986 by Dee Amaden

Modernizing Makes A Difference in Meridian, Idaho

Noreen Larsen has been food service director in Meridian, Idaho, for just 3 years. In that short time, she's managed to make changes that, as one state official puts it, "have rapidly moved Meridian into the 20th century.'

Larsen was new to school food service when she first came to Meridian, although she had managed a hospital program before. "I wasn't sure how to start,' she says, but she focused on increasing participation and balancing the books. District participation was 60 percent at best when she started.

Larsen's first attempt to attract more customers, she recalls, was to offer chocolate milk once a week to elementary students and more often to older children. She also switched from a mix to a bottled catsup. "These may seem like small changes,' she says, "but they brought more kids into the lunch lines.'

She next borrowed an idea from neighboring Boise district and began having student taste panels. Now students choose which brands they like. "This information is really valuable.' says Larsen. "We really didn't know what they wanted. The students' preferences were usually different from the choices of teachers and staff.'

Students suggested Larsen add more fresh fruits and vegetables, tossed salads, and fast-food-type items. She finds students accept these better than the casserole dishes previously offered.

Participation has grown steadily

"We've seen participation grow steadily,' Larsen says. She serves nearly 5,000 reimbursable lunches a day, up 1,000 since she started. She feels the most significant reason for improvement has been the addition of self-service bars and the aggressive nutrition education program she uses to support them.

"Through nutrition education, we show the children how to make good choices,' she says.

Larsen began adding self-serve bars 2 years ago, one school at a time, and expects to have them running at all 19 schools by the end of this school year. She first introduces salad bars, then adds potato, pasta, taco, deli, and hot dog bars.

Despite all these changes, she has managed to keep lunch costs within the students' reach. Lunches are an affordable $.80 for elementary students and $1.05 for high school students.

Putting in salad bars and teaching in classrooms has taken a lot of Larsen's time. She says computerizing many of her operations has freed time for these activities. In fact, Larsen made the move to computers at the same time she brought in the salad bars.

She had been interested in computers before she came to Meridian, she says, but had "zero experience' using them. She was prepared to spend plenty of time researching what she needed and how to set up the system. She was confident that, once installed, the computers could save time and money.

Investment has been worthwhile

On inventories alone, the improvement is dramatic. When Larsen started at Meridian, one person had worked full time on the district's inventory. Even with full-time attention, the inventory report was completed only twice a year, and the information was outdated before Larsen saw it. "It was inefficient,' she says, "and it was difficult to plan or do bid buying with that set up.'

With the computer system now in place, Larsen can do a lot more than track inventory. She chose software that was easily adapted to her needs, with a little help from others in the district. She has been able to expand one program to keep track of vendor lists, billing, ordering, and purchasing.

The program also produces a report that calculates the cost of each item, and it will also tell which foods are most popular with students. It will even compute the average monthly cost for meals served.

Larsen uses a second computer program for working with applications for free and reduced-price meals. In addition to storing records and figuring eligibility, the program can print out lists of eligible students. Larsen sends these lists to each manager weekly.

She uses a third software package to prepare salary schedules and budgets, forecast expenses, and prepare spread sheets and graphs that help her identify trends and analyze data. The staff person whose time was previously devoted to tracking inventory manually now enters data into the computer and produces a variety of reports with in.

Cost comparisons help schools save

Much of the information in the reports is broken out by school and shared with the managers so they can compare their costs to other schools'. Larsen says managers can now see if they need to bring certain costs down and where they might cut expenses.

Larsen, too, cuts costs using information from the computer reports. With current inventory information available at all times, she can better calculate how much of any item she will need over the course of the year. She can use bid buying to cut her purchasing costs.

"It takes more time,' she says, "but the savings are definitely worth it. I save between $3,00 and $5.00 per case.'

Although the initial costs of acquiring a computer may seem high, Larsen feels the system pays for itself quickly. In addition to the savings realized from bid buying, other money is saved as a result of improved accounting. "We had a billing error from our dairy supplier, which we probably wouldn't have caught without the computer. The savings from finding that one error paid for our software.'