What a year of real school menus looks like
This is real menu data from across the Collective, what programs actually served in 100s of school across a dozen states over a full school year. A couple of things stood out.
The recipes teams work hardest on are the ones that reach the menu the least. A five-plus-ingredient dish takes more time, labor and ingredients every time it runs, so even though programs have built a whole library of them, they're hard to keep in the rotation.
Which is part of why so much of the scratch effort goes into flavor. Seasoning is the one scratch move every single program makes, and the basics like ranch or caesar get batched from scratch at the start of the week. That's homemade quality without the daily lift, and one batch of sauce carries across sandwiches and assembled plates all week.
We'll keep sharing what we find.
