The 15 Top Resources From The Lunch Box

The 5 Meal Components Poster (Download)- This poster is designed to help students understand which options to choose from to make a complete lunch.

Meals per Labor Hour Worksheet (Download in English or Spanish) - Meals per Labor Hour is one of the most common productivity measurements that food service departments use when evaluating their sites.

Monthly Menu Templates (Download the sample) - We created 12 editable menus for each month of the year. You can easily add daily menu items, personalized text and image elements (e.g., a district logo), social media accounts, recipe spotlights, announcements, fun nutrition facts, or any other information that can be incorporated to make your menus engaging! This improves marketing to students, parents, and others. 

Cycle Menu Planning Workbook (Download) - By using menu cycles, meals can rotate regularly, with more popular items at higher circulation, and allow for structured planning and procurement.

Simple Menu Costing Worksheet (Download) - School food professionals must consider food costs before finalizing cycles and planning procurement. The average price of the menus serves as a baseline to assist in projecting the budget and making item selections for procurement.

Food Cost Projection Worksheet (Download in English or Spanish) - One critical challenge for districts considering significant shifts to their menu production — such as shifting from ready-to-heat to scratch cooking or adding salad bars to their program — is planning for annual food expenditures. 

Theory of Change (Download) - The Chef Ann Foundation is committed to helping school districts build, implement, and sustain a self-operated, cook-from-scratch program. We provide a continuum of programming that meets districts where they are and supports them in moving their program forward. 

Sample Job Description (Download) - Hiring can be challenging for school food professionals. The Lunch Box provides sample job descriptions for 16 different positions associated with school food service.

Make a Rainbow Poster (Download) - This graphic is used for general marketing at the salad bar. It can also be used for Rainbow Days. The Chef Ann Foundation has granted over 6,000 salad bars through our Salad Bars to Schools program. 

Emergency Feeding Resources—School is increasingly interrupted by emergency issues related to health, the environment, and other current crises. These resources help schools be constantly prepared to pivot their food programs to react to changing situations.

Food Cost and Inventory Tracking (Download) - This tool provides an easy way to monitor food costs effectively in real-time. By performing a monthly analysis, school food professionals can respond immediately to an increase in food costs instead of attempting to adjust later in the year when it is often too late.

Scratch Cooking One-Pager (Download) - There are many definitions of scratch cooking. For us, scratch cooking means school districts cooking their own meals and incorporating whole, fresh ingredients rather than pre-assembled or processed meals and meal components. This one-pager was created to help schools learn and promote the benefits of scratch cooking. 

Hours Assigned to Hours Worked Worksheet (Download) - This tracking is essential because if hours worked are more than the assigned hours, the department will exceed its payroll budget before the year is complete.

Sample Menu Forecasting (Download) - This tool illustrates how using a cycle menu and applying average daily participation rates and frequency will provide useful procurement data for planning.

Spanish resources - We’ve translated many of these top resources into Spanish (like this Make a Rainbow poster) and are working to translate more resources and broaden the reach of these tools.