One of our recurring challenges has been breaking students away from simple foods like burger, pizza, nuggets. It’s difficult to imagine striking any new ground when your labor-intensive, culturally diverse, healthy, and much more interesting dishes go untouched in favor of the old and familiar. Rehashing tired ideas only leads to less participation. The trick? Keep trying.
It’s not just a trite excuse that young humans will turn down anything new the first ten times they see it. This is long-proven fact. Food costs can be mitigated with federal subsidies but labor costs and serving times need to be managed assiduously. The best plan then is to work towards your goals with these ‘limitations’ in mind. Use the opportunity to highlight and demonstrate new dishes without any expectations of your guests’ participation. The first few times you’re deploying a new dish, try these few hacks to see if you can shorten the number of cycles required for their hard-wired suspicion to fade and get them to pick up those novel and interesting meal choices!
Always host a taste-test. Change the conversation from each student is a reimbursable meal to each student is a brand ambassador. Use the opportunity to ask your young guests what kind of items they might want to see on your menus. You could be surprised by the answer. I once asked a group, following a silly whim, if they might be into combinations foods like ‘oh, I don’t know… spaghetti tacos’. Turns out a Nickelodeon show had that as a featured bit of ridiculousness!
Prepare smaller quantities. It’s okay to run out, especially on new items deployed as first-run specials. This may actually work towards your goal by helping create a sense of urgency and demand. If you’re running fewer than three choices it may be worth increasing your offerings, anyway!
Incentivize the brave and reward the bold. It’s always a bad idea to use food as a reward but if food is the challenge, the reward could be in trying new foods. Offer paper crowns, stickers, or other low-cost, high-visibility, visually fun rewards that also create no environmental impact or classroom disruption. A recent idea in the New York Times was to bring second graders from a NYC public school and treat them to a fine dining experience. Why not reward taste-leaders with a change in environment, such as a special table or outside seating, or the opportunity to be a part of an after school test group.
related: New York City Schools rewards students with a one-of-a-kind experience at Daniel. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/magazine/fine-dining-for-second-graders.html
Tie into the curricula. Once while testing Latin foods like yuca fries and murduros we were pleasantly surprised to hear a chorus of yes when we asked if they’d heard of these foods before, because we were wary of dealing with these students having never tried any of them. In Florida, fourth grade social studies, local state history is part of the lessons and the text that same day had mentioned many of the foods we were testing! They eagerly jumped at a chance to try the items the characters described but they didn’t understand. Their teacher had primed the pump for our efforts, and we reinforced the lesson because we added a visceral, timely element.
Don’t try to do too much. Young people more likely to try new foods when they have some personal engagement and agency. This can certainly be difficult in the cafeteria lines, especially with the very young who might have issues making complex choices in a short amount of time, but if you have an opportunity to provide a multiple colors, textures, and flavor profiles, they’re more likely to enjoy foods they’ve chosen. Think of the models Subway and Chipotle are built on – kids will go through the lines and pick their own ingredients, which is the kind of buy-in any FNS would love to have! If you’re short on labor and time and pick-and-choose models are impractical, pre-bundled choices can be built from the most popular combinations to fill in the gaps.
I completely blame unimaginative chefs and kitchen managers here because I used to be one of them. The restaurant kids’ menu is too often an afterthought, a tacked-on bit of fried foods and cheesy pasta. Same as what everyone else serves. It’s fulfills the purpose of keeping the kids quiet long enough to give the parents a momentary break from having to cook something at home. Still, it’s a cul-de-sac of sad and unfulfilled potential. Parents are unlikely allies to try to encourage new things since restaurants are the perfect opportunity to introduce new flavors. Suggest to parents and PTOs that they skip the kids menu at restaurants and go family-style! Encourage young eaters to try a little of everything the adults are having. Until the age of five, one of my child’s favorite dishes was broccoli in Thai green curry sauce because it was also one of mine, with a regular weekly appearance. Soon enough it was dinosaur nuggets and quesadillas, but I had a far easier time than other parents in our group introducing more variety because I’d been able to lay that foundation of trust and excitement for novelty.
related: The Kids’ Menu is a trap! https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/06/09/618025893/want-your-child-to-try-eat-almost-everything-skip-the-kids-menu
As with most things I’ll espouse, the trick is patience and practice. It won’t happen over night, but even small steps forward can be called progress. What ultimately matters is making your guests feel welcomed and appreciated. That’s the heart of food service.
