Breakfast Best Practices
For secondary students, breakfast is not seen as “trendy”. Most students want to spend their time with friends while the other large portion of students simply don’t have time between waking up and arriving at the first class to grab breakfast. This makes it difficult for this age group to engage with school breakfast.
Based on the barriers and best practices listed in the previous chapters, the goal is to meet students where they are. For school districts (and schools), this challenge will change based on your specific group of students. To start off identifying which best practices work for your school, let’s begin by understanding our students more using the questions below:
- Which doors can students enter the building before school starts?
- Based on breakfast service, when do students arrive?
- Are students separated in different locations while waiting for school to begin? If so, where? Why?
- Where are your athletes and any extracurricular activities occurring in the school prior to the start of the school day?
- Does your school have gas stations or other fast food restaurants nearby? If so, which ones?
- How does communication with students work in the school? Does email, announcements, student television, social media, or another form reach the students?
- Do you offer free breakfast? Do all the students (and families) know this?
- If your school does provide free breakfast to all students, how are you communicating this? What does the reach look like?
Taste Testing
For this age group, the best way to engage students is to let them provide feedback on the actual recipesTest tasting in secondary schools can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Here’s a few of our favorites:
Option 1: Student Leaders narrow down the Options.
With this test tasting option, you find the school nutrition recipes (or products) and allow the students leaders to taste each option. The student leader group you select is up to you really, but we recommend asking for recommendations from teachers and school administration. A student leader group could be student council, nutrition/health sciences class, or a marketing class. If you have limited time or staff, this is the one to start with. You will need less product and time preparing to gain feedback from students. Think of this as a focus group, in which you should plan to ask more questions than which recipe is their favorite.
Option 2: Use School Nutrition Recipes/Products.
The difference with this option is you have a wider audience than the first option, which requires more of your time. This is best implemented by allowing the students to vote on their favorite. Think about making it a game and include technology - like an online survey where you can showcase the results in real time on television screens in the cafeteria.
Power Tip!
Did you know? The School Nutrition Association (SNA) and USDA provide free resources for National School Breakfast Week (NSBW), Farm to School or National Nutrition Month.
Let’s Make Breakfast Fun
- Since breakfast isn’t seen as cool for secondary students, we need to lean into marketing breakfast in a way that students will want to join.
- One way to engage students is through advertising what you are already doing (or serving) in a way that is unique.
- Schools across the country serve a variety of items on the breakfast menus - let’s capitalize on that by celebrating these recipes and advertise them with themed holidays.
- To help you with your planning, simply search for national food holidays for the month (or you could look by year and plan ahead).
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