Meet Crystal Beattie, a food service lead in a Westchester school district for the past 9 years. She makes cooking for 500 students look easy and she is one of the few schools that offers hot breakfast like those yummy sausage egg and cheese sandwiches in the cafeteria.

While offering breakfast in the lunchroom may have logistical challenges to fit all students into a relatively narrow time window, it comes with the great advantage of being able to offer a hot breakfast menu and also keeping all food and waste in the lunchroom, rather than in the individual classrooms.

Most school districts participate in the National School Lunch Program, established in 1946 under President Truman. This program helps public schools to provide low cost or free lunches to students. About 7.1 million children participated in the NSLP in its first year. Since then, the program has reached millions of children nationwide: 1970: 22.4 million children; 1980: 26.6 million children; 1990: 21.1 million children; 2000: 27.3 million children; 2010: 31.8 million children; and 2016: 30.4 million children.

During the pandemic all schools became eligible for free breakfast and free lunch and meals were then served in the individual classrooms to limit student contacts.

That meant for Food Service providers to heavily rely on commercially available, individually wrapped food items with long shelf life. And that means of course mountains of packaging garbage and food scraps in each of those classrooms. And milk spills in the classrooms, and food scraps on the floor, and an extra garbage run through every classroom by the custodial staff, replacing plastic bags in each classroom….

Can you just see the amount of labor, materials and garbage attached to this issue?

A typical breakfast in the classroom consists of a plastic bag that contains a plastic wrapped starch (bagel, muffin, granola bar or cereal) , fruit juice or milk carton and sometimes a jogurt. Food service staff will fill these items into bags, then knot them, then place them into individual tubs that will be brought up to each classroom. Students usually grab a bag, or open one on the spot to just remove the one item they want to eat and all the rest will go either in the garbage in the classroom, or will make its way down to the kitchen to be discarded there into the garbage.

The untouched food waste is just staggering, here is an example of returned breakfast items on one day from a school with 500 students.

Bringing breakfast back into the lunchroom has many advantages