By Derek Wilson
Marinscope
The school lunch options in Marin County might not include French toast pizza, rather students are more likely to be able to choose from a variety of sushi, quesadillas, or wraps — all individually packaged and delivered to classrooms.
As school officials make plans to ease back into the classroom in August an image is becoming clearer of what schools in a post-quarantine society might look like. As schools continue to require safe distancing, however, challenges surround one of the most social aspects of the school day: lunch.
On June 18, Marin Public Health and Marin County Office of Education issued A Public Health Guided Return to Site-Based Classroom Instruction. The guide calls for students to maintain the same group of classmates throughout the school day, during class, lunch and recess.
The cafeteria line could be temporarily closed down at several schools. State guidelines to protect against COVID-19 for schools reopening in the fall advise eliminating cafeteria service or placing sneeze guards at food and cashier stations along the buffet line.
More students will likely be brown-bagging their lunches in the fall. That’s where Choicelunch steps in with its new contactless school lunch program, A la Carte, with meals delivered in individual paper bags to students on campus.
“You can’t have kids come to the buffet line and pick their lunch items on site anymore. That doesn’t work in this future,” said Choicelunch Chief Operating Officer Keith Cosbey. “We needed to rethink how we can operate safely and preserve the cornerstone of choice.”
Choicelunch, a school lunch program founded in 2003, served more than 300 public, private and charter schools across the state in the 2019-20 school year. The program has contracts with the Mill Valley and Reed Union school districts. The MVSD includes six schools (Edna Maguire, Old Mill, Strawberry Point, Park School, Mill Valley Middle and Tam Valley), while Reed covers three public schools (Reed Elementary, Bel Aire and Del Mar). Choicelunch also works with three private schools in Marin: St. Isabella School in San Rafael, St. Anselm School in San Anselmo, and Our Lady of Loretto School in Novato.
The program allows students and parents to log onto a mobile app to choose from one of 16 entrees ahead of time, as well as side dishes, fruits and beverages. Students can build a lunch from an entree list that includes a hot dog, spaghetti and meatballs, sushi, sandwiches, wraps, or other items. Snacks include popcorn, string cheese, muffins and cookies and more. The fruit menu offers apples, melons and other seasonal items. Students can wash it down with milk, apple juice, orange juice, or bottled water … but it seems no Starbucks coffee.
“I have three children and there is not one fruit that all three would eat,” Cosbey said. “What good is a safe food program if the children won’t eat the food? We have to make sure they have a choice.”
The order is then prepared and brown-bagged in a professional kitchen facility in Hayward or Danville and is delivered to Marin schools. The schools can then deliver the lunch bags, labeled for each individual student, to classrooms for lunch, all with minimal physical contact.
“First, everyone at the kitchen is wearing masks, hats and lab coats,” Cosbey said. “The delivery driver wears personal protective equipment. We don’t even need to do any interaction with folks at the school for delivery. Since the lunch is all pre-bagged, the school can deliver them to the classrooms. It seems likely there will be no such thing as a cafeteria or a social lunch time.”
The A la Carte app takes some of the stress and work out of preparing lunches at home in the morning before sending the children to school. Parents might even be jealous they can’t use the service to order lunches for their own offices.
The program also includes a feature to allow families to filter out foods that might cause an allergic reaction. Schools may also customize the menu to include or remove certain foods or beverages. Choicelunch offerings include local and organic food items.
The lunches comply with guidelines for the National School Lunch Program, a federally assisted meal program operating in public and nonprofit private schools and residential child care institutions. It provides nutritionally balanced, low-cost or free lunches to children each school day.
The Choicelunch menu is certainly different from the one Cosbey choose from at the school cafeteria in Buffalo growing up.
“You had one choice a day and if you didn’t like it, you could bring food from home. The food was pretty basic, with pasta, cheeseburgers, chicken tenders and the like,” Cosbey recalled. “But the big item there was French toast pizza. You wouldn’t see wraps or sushi on that menu.”
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