Shuhan Zhan, Chinbulai Maly Pra NST 135 Yishan Huang, Janelle Yu Williams Spring 2016 Project Title: Student Lunch Preference Analysis in K-12 Schools Project Facility: Oakland Unified School District OUSD Nutrition Services Contact: Amy Glodde, [email protected]Project Purpose: Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) Nutrition Services is a source of food for one hundred K-12 campuses as well as two charter schools. Each school participates in the National school lunch, breakfast, and snack program. Their goal is to support students in building healthy lifestyles to attribute to a successful academic career. The budget consists of federal and state reimbursements and on-site sales. A recent grant from the USDA has allowed the district financial capabilities to increase sourcing from local producers, making it possible for OUSD to implement a California Thursday themed lunch into all of the schools in the district. To be considered local, the food must be sourced from within a two hundred-fifty mile radius of Oakland. With the purchasing power of millions of dollars, OUSD can play a large role in keeping jobs and money within the state. This program is a great way to implement structural change, support the local economy, the environment, and promote a healthy lifestyle for students. By looking at 1
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Shuhan Zhan, Chinbulai Maly Pra NST 135Yishan Huang, Janelle Yu Williams Spring 2016
Project Purpose: Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) Nutrition Services is a source of food for one hundred K-12 campuses as well as two charter schools. Each school participates in the National school lunch, breakfast, and snack program. Their goal is to support students in building healthy lifestyles to attribute to a successful academic career. The budget consists of federal and state reimbursements and on-site sales. A recent grant from the USDA has allowed the district financial capabilities to increase sourcing from local producers, making it possible for OUSD to implement a California Thursday themed lunch into all of the schools in the district. To be considered local, the food must be sourced from within a two hundred-fifty mile radius of Oakland. With the purchasing power of millions of dollars, OUSD can play a large role in keeping jobs and money within the state. This program is a great way to implement structural change, support the local economy, the environment, and promote a healthy lifestyle for students. By looking at quantitative data from multiple schools for trends on food preference, the efficiency of this program can be improved.
Project Goal: To track entree preference and waste in order to observe differences or similarities in entree preferences with students in each educational stage from K-12. Since procuring seasonal and locally sourced foods is more expensive than conventionally sourced produce, it is important to maximize sustainability and efficiency so that this program can continue. With the information from this report, OUSD Nutrition Services can continue to monitor the success of the meals designed for this program,
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track waste, and implement changes where necessary. In order to observe the trends, decrease food waste, and forecast future purchases, it is important to look at relevant data from multiple months and multiple schools.
Process: Our group conducted an initial meeting with Registered Dietitian Amy Glodde, the Menu Planner & Training Supervisor from OUSD Nutrition Services to discuss the objective and goals of the project. Each group member was assigned to analyze the Daily Production Records for a specific group of schools: K-5, K-8, Middle School or High School. The OUSD Daily Production Records are manually logged recordings of the recipe name, cooking temperature, portion size, quantity prepared, quantity served and amount leftover for every item served during lunch.
To evaluate both the entree preference and food waste for the months of October, November, January and February, we utilized an excel spreadsheet to calculate the frequency an item was served, the amount of food served and the amoun of food leftover for each entree. This spreadsheet will be used by OUSD Nutrition Services to monitor the success of each entree. While we have collected data for numerous months, for the purpose of this report, we will focus on the analysis of California Thursday entrees in the month of October in 2015.
The information was further aggregated by grouping all high school data together, all middle school data together, all K-8 schools together and all K-5 schools together. Afterwards, we exported our data to graphs for visual comparison. Although we observed that 17 different entrees were served in this month, we chose to focus the analysis on the entrees that each school had in common ( Grilled cheese, Cheese quesadilla, BBQ Chicken with red beans & rice, Asian chicken, Beef Chili with tortilla chips, Veggie Tacos, Jambalaya) with the addition of an entree served only in high schools and middle schools, but with an exceptionally high frequency (cheese pizza).
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Results: According to the OUSD tables, patterns in the food preference of each school are easily observed. Certain entrees are clearly more popular than others. This is shown in the data by the large quantity production and little to no waste by the students. Beef Chili with Tortilla is the most popular entree, whose waste rates never exceeded 5%. Cheese Pizza, served with the most frequency (18 in Middle School, 18 in High School) is highly popular. BBQ Chicken with Red Beans & Rice also receives high preference from three groups. There are less preferred entrees reflected with lower consumption rate. Cheese Quesadilla and Grilled Cheese have the highest serving frequencies, but generate largest percentage of waste among all entrees served. Many other entrees show unpredictable and inconsistent results among different groups, but they are mostly served with relatively low frequency. For example, Veggie Tacos show different consumption levels at different educational stages. Serving Veggie Tacos in K-8 results in 50% waste, but it only produces 6% waste in high school and K-5. With respect to the general food waste trend, the total percentage of food waste for high school, middle school, K-8 and K-5 are 6%, 4%, 7% and 4% respectively, with K-8 schools producing the most waste among all school groups.
It is important to note that the data collection process can produce a margin of error. There are dates at multiple sites where the kitchen staff did not record the data so we did not have values to calculate. The staff has also been known to write down information in front of Amy that may or may not be correct just to have numbers on the paper. Human error can always occur and this may be something that affected our group data collection as well. However, the margin of error is small enough relative to the amount of data we processed so that our values can be considered an accurate representation of the school lunch trends of Oakland Unified School District.
Conclusion: Cheese pizza is the most popular entree for Middle School and High School. This is contributed to pizza being the constant and default entree for each Thursday while other entrees are cycled onto the
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menu. This is reflected in the frequency of pizza served relative to other entrees served. Grilled Cheese Sandwiches and Cheese Quesadilla are also served with high frequency, but have a higher percentage of waste. This may indicate the need to decrease the quantities of these entrees and increase the quantities of more popular entrees such as Beef Chili with Tortilla. There are other entrees that are only served once and have no waste, which indicates that these items could be served in more volume and with more frequency, such as Spicy Chicken Sandwich, BBQ Chicken Sandwich, and Turkey Sandwich. After completing this analysis, it has become clear that quantitative tracking of student preferences contains a lot of complexities that need to be addressed. The next step:
1. With the information provided, preference was calculated by amount of food wasted and the frequency an entree was served. A suggestion would be to have food service staff track the time an entree runs out to determine popularity of a food item rather than relying on food waste data to determine preference.
2. Certain schools consistently show zero waste which may be an area of concern. While it is great that all food is consumed, it brings about the following questions: did students go hungry that day because there is not enough food prepared? Is there an acceptable margin of waste to ensure that there is enough food available for all students who need lunch? Are there procedures in place to produce food for hungry students on days too few entrees were prepared?
3. Improve staff training on tracking food consumption because there is a lot of missing data, which may have affected our results.
4. Switch from logging data manually to computerized entries for more accurate and real-time data.
Resources:
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Glodde, Amy RD, MPH. Menu Planner & Training Supervisor. Oakland Unified School District Nutrition Services
Oakland Unified School District Daily Production Records. October 2015High Schools -Skyline, Oakland High, Fremont High, Havenscourt Middle Schools - Elmhurst, West Oakland, Roosevelt, HavenscourtK-8 Schools - Piedmont, Hoover, Parker, MelroseK-5 Schools -Franklin, Highland, Stonehurst F, Lincoln
