New and Innovative Approaches To Improving Your School Nutrition Program

Wesley Delbridge

CUSD Nutrition has been one of the leaders in maintaining& growing a successful school nutrition program through the recent changes in federal guidelines and negative media coverage. By creating customer satisfaction assessments, targeting specific customer needs, utilizing technology and social media and improving food quality and presentation, CUSD has seen an increase in participation, revenue and customer satisfaction. The presenter went through the research and methods they used to achieve these results.

Many new ideas were shown with a focus being on increasing meal participation and customer satisfaction. CUSD has focused many of its resources on finding out through different avenues what students and parents want in a school nutrition program and treating them as customers. Surveys, taste testings, focus groups, advisory councils are all many ideas that CUSD has employed to understand their customer needs.

The other areas of focus in this session were ways to decrease expenses in food costs and supplies including a major decrease in printing costs. The savings from this allows the nutrition department to use those funds on increased food quality and marketing.  Social media is also a huge focus for CUSD and the session described in detail how to launch a successful social media platform and how to increase followers and improve customer interactions.

Many districts across the nation are struggling with how to keep their school nutrition programs successful through the new nutrition Federal regulations. Participation has decreased nationwide and the perception of school nutrition has become more and more negative in the media. The information presented in this session will equip schools and districts with new and innovative approaches to have successful school nutrition programs that have been tried and tested.

Terry Locke
Chandler Unified School District