Meals and Food Items

This article explains the difference between the Lunch module’s meals and food items and provides best practices and directions on managing them.

Meals represent the time of day your school serves meals to students. Most schools serve lunch, but others may also serve breakfast and snack throughout the day. Meanwhile, food items represent what students and/or employees may purchase. Meals and food items go hand in hand because when a food item is created, it must be assigned a meal so that students can purchase that food item during its designated meal.

Meals and Food Items can be managed from the school or the district level. Single school districts and districts that run cafeterias independently should create their own meals and food items at the school level. Districts with multiple school buildings, or who would like to manage meals and/or food items from a central office can do so from the district level. This is done by the “availability” field.

To manage Meals and Food Items:

• Go to Main > Lunch > Meals and Food Items

Best practice dictates creating the smallest number of meals and food items possible. Most schools serve food once a day during lunch; therefore, you should only create additional meals if necessary. Additionally, combine food items with the same price instead of creating many individual items that only differ by name. Too many food items will complicate the lunch line.  For example, if there is a cold lunch option for $3 and a hot lunch option for $5 everyday, then create a single food item for hot lunch and a single food item for cold lunch. You can create a lunch menu to indicate to students and staff what is being served each day in more detail.

Below we will describe navigation on the meals and food items page.

Hove over a meal and you will see the following options:

Icon	Location	Use
	Left	Expand the meal to display all food items assigned to it
	Right	Add a new food item. Use if the food item does not exist already.
	Right	Edit the current meal. Allows updating reimbursement values (dollar amount received from USDA Free-Reduced Lunch program) and other fields
	Right	Delete the meal. Allowed only when the meal has not been served in the selected academic year.

After expanding a meal, you can hover over a food item and see the following options:

Icon	Location	Use
	Right	Edit the current food item. Done once a year to update student and employee pricing, which cannot be updated once the food item is used.
	Right	Delete the food item. Allowed only when it has not been served in the selected academic year.