Tight Budgets & Snack Sales

As a Financial Management consultant, I often find myself at odds with the need to help a program make money and the quest for "wellness".  When I am in a district that is having financial difficulties, and a superintendent has confided in me that "the loss must stop", I must first seek ways for the program to make more money.  In doing so, I have no choice but to look at ways to first increase breakfast and lunch sales, and then ala Carte and snack sales.  Some managers and directors find my approach to be "anti-nutrition", but without a program whose operational costs are totally funded, there may be no program. 

My approach is simple, if I were still the VP of a Food Service Management Company, what would I do in this district to make money?  It's that simple.  But the solution often requires the previously mentioned paradigm change for the food service manager, building principals, and the business office.

In these consulting visits, I normally have very little problem with the status-quo at the elementary level, as it is the parent who normally decides if their elementary student will obtain lunch and/or breakfast at school, or bring it from home.  The situation is very different at the secondary level.  At this level, it is the student that decides what they want to eat, and where it will come from - home, the school cafeteria, or outside delivery.  It is these students who have the money to support the program.  However, all to often I find that the quest to "mandate good nutrition", impacts far more heavily on this segment of the student population.  The one group that has the money to spend.  Yet, we tell these same students many of whom drive to and from school with a cup of coffee, or Coke in their hand, smoking a cigarette, that they can't have a potato chip at lunch.

Unless and until the Federal, State, and local governments decide that the school cafeteria is an integral part of the total educational process, and decide to fully fund it as they do the classroom, custodial services, and busing operations, managers and directors must do what they can to ensure adequate revenue to the program.  If that means expanding vending and snack sales, so be it.  The alternative is to cut the operation to the "bone", contract it out to a Food Service Management Company, or incur ever increasing General Fund subsidies.