School Lunch and Children's Nutrition

Children spilled into the courtyard of Havens Elementary School in Piedmont one recent day as a cluster of mom-volunteers sorted through box lunches of sushi and edamame and grabbed hot meals from a portable warming oven.

Wire bins brimmed with bags of baked snack chips and packets of pineapple and orange chunks, stamped with the name Choicelunch and “100% Fresh, 100% Yummy, 100% Smart.”

Choicelunch, one of a handful of private companies that provide school lunches in the Bay Area, has helped Havens Elementary meet parent demand for nutritious and tasty foods produced in a sustainable manner.

It has also helped with another of the parents’ goals: turning the lunch program into a profit center that can help support other school services, which is especially helpful at a time of sizable budget cuts.

School lunch as a moneymaker is not possible in most public schools because the federal National School Lunch Program that provides subsidies to feed low-income students specifically prohibits it.

In the vast majority of Bay Area schools, the federal lunch program is a necessity, not an option, because many of their students need it. In Oakland’s school district, 70 percent of children qualify based on family income; in West Contra Costa County 66 percent are eligible. In those districts, some students are hard-pressed to pay even $3 for a full-price lunch.

But affluent districts can opt out of the program if they are willing to subsidize needy students themselves, and almost two dozen districts across the Bay Area have done that.

While poor and middle-class school districts in cities like Oakland and Richmond grapple with creating healthier meals on the $2.72 a meal provided by the federal government, upscale districts are moving toward much higher-quality food while also making money.

At Havens Elementary, Choicelunch provides an assortment of pre-ordered hot and cold meals every day. The price is usually $6, with premium entrees like sushi costing $6.25.

“They have worked with us on locally sourced foods, and they address all our parents’ needs regarding food allergies,” said Heather Meil, the school’s parent volunteer coordinator. “They just rolled out gluten-free chicken nuggets. Our children are very sophisticated eaters. Their top choices are sushi and pot stickers.”

For every Choicelunch sold, the school’s Parent Club receives $1.80. “It is seen as a fund raiser,” Meil said of the lunch program. “We serve 90 to 120 lunches a day, so over the school year we bring in 30 to 40 thousand dollars.”

She said the Parent Club was using the extra money this year for math and science resources and enrichments and a technology coordinator, among other things.

In the nearby East Bay town of Orinda, the public intermediate school has named its cafeteria Bow Wow Chow, and it sells meals that are pre-ordered from local restaurants, as well as a variety of snacks, sandwiches and salads.

Each day, a different vendor provides hot meals according to a menu chosen by parents and Linda Judkins, the district’s food supervisor. They pay attention to state nutrition rules set out in SB12, a law enacted in 2007 that sets limits on fats and calories (400 per entree) in school lunches. Although the school does not have to abide by federal nutrition standards because it does not participate in the subsidy program for poor children, parents have adopted the standards anyway, Judkins said.

Cathie Barrows, one of 255 parent volunteers who operate the food service under Judkins’ direction, said the meals raised $140,000 last year for school programs. They cost $2.95 to $3.75 per order from the vendors and are sold for $5.25, which includes a drink or a fruit or vegetable. Each sale yields a $1 profit.

“The money goes back to the parents club. It goes to teachers’ salaries,” Judkins said. “We generate money to save programs. We have French and Spanish. We have computers.”

Barrows, who got involved in the food program after her daughter was diagnosed with diabetes, said: “I want to de-emphasize the profit aspect. It’s a service to the kids.”

Parents who consider the price of the meals too high simply do not participate and send a lunch from home, but 75 percent of the 800 students in the school are enrolled in the pre-order program. There are a few students — 15 this school year — who would qualify for the free or reduced-cost lunch under the federal guidelines, and they receive the pre-ordered meals, Judkins said, with nothing that would identify them as being different.

Choicelunch, which is based in San Ramon, began in the early 1990s and has grown steadily each year, said Sophie Johnson, a spokeswoman. Three years ago, the company served 50 schools. Now, it serves 15,000 lunches daily to 180 schools — about a third of them public schools, with half in the Bay Area.

“We have 17 choices a day. That means we can serve sushi to mac and cheese,” Johnson said. “We charge about $4.50, and that includes an entree, fruit and vegetable and drink. It is not the $2.72 lunch that government reimburses for. The public schools we work with in general are in areas with few free- and reduced-lunch-eligible kids.”

She said that such districts tended to be smaller and have no centralized kitchens — and no unionized food service employees, a fact Johnson called a “dirty little secret.” Parent volunteers, in fact, are central to making money-generating lunch programs work.

Kid Chow, a San Francisco company founded a decade ago by the husband-and-wife team of Rob and Jamie Feuerman, has also built a following among affluent schools — public and private — in the Bay Area, with lunches that offer all-organic fruits and vegetables and local sourcing of ingredients when possible. Of the 40 schools it contracts with, one-quarter to one-third use lunch sales as a fund-raiser, Feuerman said.

“In some cases, schools select the lunch provider based on their ability to do fund-raising,” she said. Kid Chow charges $4.25 to $6.50 for each lunch, depending on the volume of the account and the specifics of the meals.

In Lafayette, another upscale East Bay city, three of the five schools have a fund-raising aspect to their lunch service, according to Traci Reilly, parent and coordinator of the lunch program at Lafayette Elementary School. Reilly said that her school had “a fair amount of free and reduced” eligible students, and that they ate free, with the district reimbursing the company. State Education Department statistics show that in the 2009-10 school year, 73 Lafayette Elementary students, or 2.3 percent, were eligible for free or reduced-price lunches.

Reilly said her parents selected Choicelunch and the school signed a contract with it.

“Some of the vendors that are 100 percent organic — their prices are prohibitive,” she said. “We needed a price point our parents can afford, and Choicelunch does a good job of balancing healthy food with a good price. We sell meals for around $4.75 to $5.” That price includes a 15-cent add-on that comes back to the school.

 “That is our fund-raising — it’s like a surcharge,” she said. “We’re always looking for extra money and trying to have more families participate in the fund-raising.”