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C
ycle menus—how boring!” “Don’t the students get tired of eating the
same menu all year round?” “How do you even plan for a year-long
menu?” These are just a few of the comments and questions often asked
about the cycle menus at Portland (Ore.) Public Schools. But its Nutrition
Services department has been using this planning tactic for more than 10 years. Why?
Because the standardization of cycle menus offers better efficiency, regulatory compliance,
ease of documentation, managed staff expectations, improved culinary expertise, lowered
food and labor costs—and the students are happy.
Cycle
Menus 101
Let this primer
motivate you to
manage menu
development for
the long haul.
By whitney ellersick, ms, rdn
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SchoolNutrıtıon
• NOVEMBER 2015
There are so many advantages to using
cycle menus, it’s hard to believe that there
are school nutrition programs across the
country that don’t use this menu-planning
approach. But there are—and it’s likely due to
a combination of factors. Clearly, some
districts aren’t aware of the breadth of
benefits that cycle menus offer. There are also
a few misconceptions about cycle menus,
such as fears that they will limit creativity and
flexibility. Districts that emphasize site-based
management and/or don’t have a strong
central school nutrition administration may
not be in the position to establish or enforce
the use of cycle menus at individual sites.
Finally, many inexperienced school nutrition
operators, especially those without a
professional or educational background in
foodservice or dietetics, simply may not know
where and how to start.
How can you learn to adopt a cycle menu
approach in your district? Let’s review the
fundamentals and explore a four-step
process.
not use a standing menu or a cycle menu,
but literally change offerings every single
night, as directed by the chef.
Can you imagine trying to write a menu
every day?! The turnaround time for
planning, ordering food and delivering
menus to families makes writing a weekly
menu prohibitive. For most school districts,
developing a new menu even on a monthto-month basis is an incredibly time-consuming task—and most of us don’t have that
kind of time.
On the flip side, while your site may offer
certain menu options every day (such as an
entrée salad, grab ‘n’ go sandwiches or a
daily pizza station), if your entire menu was
as fixed as, say, McDonald’s, your customers
would seek other options for a change of
pace. Setting aside all the other benefits, a
cycle menu is an efficient process for you
that offers variety to your students. Now that
you understand the basic concepts of a cycle
menu, let’s take a look at how you create
one for your school meals operation.
A Menu of Menuing Options First, let’s
start with the basics: What is a cycle menu?
It’s a rotating menu that is different every
day and repeats itself after a specific number
of days or weeks. Most commercial restaurants offer a fixed menu that changes very
little: You can order the dish you ate today
at lunch tomorrow, on Friday, next Wednesday, at the end of the month and every day
in between, if you choose. A restaurant may
change its daily specials or it may make
seasonal modifications, but most menu-item
availability tends not to flow through a
rotation. A very expensive restaurant may
What’s the “right” cycle? Cycles can vary; a
short cycle might be two to three weeks,
while a longer cycle menu may rotate every
five to six weeks. The length depends on the
needs and restrictions of your operation and
the preferences and expectations of your
audience. A longer cycle is going to provide
more variety. There’s no one-size-fits-all
model of cycle menu that applies to all
districts—or even to all school sites and
meal programs served by a district. Some
districts may use one cycle for elementary
schools and another for high schools.
Step One: Choose Your Cycle Length
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myONcore.com SNAMagAd FINAL.pdf 1
The “cycles” of the cycle menus used in
Portland Public Schools vary among the
different meal programs PPS offers: breakfast, lunch, supper, summer and Head Start.
For example, PPS uses a three-week cycle
menu for school breakfast, while developing
a six-week cycle menu (with a few repeated
entrees here and there) for its lunch
offerings. Lunch gets the longer cycle,
because it is a more robust program with the
highest participation!
Among the advantages of the six-week
cycle menu is the regular opportunity for
PPS to put a new entrée or recipe on the
menu to try it out as a limited-time offer,
similar to the approach of many commercial
restaurants. Customers are introduced to the
new item, and the staff have ample time to
monitor sales, gather feedback and make
revisions as necessary—and do so without
making a commitment to serving it more
often. At the end of the review period or
school year, the staff can determine whether
the entrée or recipe is popular or should be
eliminated as an option.
3/24/2015 12:42:46 PM
myONcore.com
My menus made easy.
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M
Build menus
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Requirements
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Populate
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reports
Get back to
doing the job
you love!
CY
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myONcore.com is an online food based menu
building solution for all schools to help
comply with USDA nutrition standards for
school meals.
K
www.myONcore.com
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855.385.8622
• NOVEMBER 2015
[email protected]
You don’t need to lock into one cycle
menu for the entire year. Portland has
created rotations for its fall, winter and
spring academic quarters. This allows the
school nutrition team to feature its homemade, hearty entrees (such as chicken
noodle soup, beef stew and turkey, gravy
and mashed potatoes) in the winter months,
when they’re likely to have greater appeal
than in springtime, when the weather isn’t
right for this brand of comfort food.
Lunch (and breakfast) during the summer
months is a considerably different operation.
Participation in the Summer Food Service
Program (SFSP) is lower, fewer staff are
needed to manage this program and
portable meals are preferred for off-site
deliveries. The relatively short duration of
the SFSP is another factor. Portland uses a
one- or two-week cycle menu for summer
meals. This keeps things simple and allows
time for the central district staff to focus on
preparing for the upcoming school year.
Step Two: Do the Math and Determine
the Deadlines Planning your cycle menu is
not that different from writing any school
menu. You need to start with main dishes first
and then add in the other components in
accordance with the meal pattern requirements. Strive for balance in flavors, color,
shapes, textures, nutrient profiles, etc. Vary
the forms of different foods—raw vs. cooked
veggies, whole vs. cut-up fruits and so on.
Include a surprise item occasionally. Incorporate different ethnic cuisines. Consider sales
data from last year to identify favorite item
combinations. You also will take into account
per-meal costs, ingredient availability and
potential substitutions, as well as equipment
limitations, staff expertise, work schedules
and other operational factors.
Menu planning for the next school year
begins well before the current school year is
even half over. This is driven by several
procurement deadlines—particularly the need
to decide how you will use your USDA Foods
allotment. This is another step that happens
whether you are preparing monthly menus or
creating a cycle for the entire year, because
this decision must be made by early March.
But this reveals another advantage of
using cycle menus. If you know, for example,
that you plan to offer a fruit salad three
times in your six-week cycle, you’ll offer it
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roughly 18 times in the school year. You can
plug that number in with your other
forecasting data points, such as enrollment,
average daily participation, the popularity of
fruit salad last year and the availability of
locally grown fruits when determining what
you will request from USDA Foods.
Remember that costing step that must be
estimated with any menu? Cycle menus can
have a positive impact on this calculation,
because you can order larger quantities of
an ingredient or a menu item and get a
better price point for your volume.
There’s no doubt that cycle menus take a
lot of upfront planning. But over the course
of the year, you will spend much less time on
menu development when you use a
cycle-menu approach than if you try to write
new menus each month.
Step Three: Make Space for Flexibility
Cycle menus don’t have to be rigid—in fact,
you want to ensure some flexibility, if only to
allow for possible ingredient swaps when
manufacturers or distributors encounter
product shortages or pass along unanticipated price spikes or if you have an
equipment failure in your production
kitchen. Cycle menus give you and your
team an opportunity to try different preparation styles without being completely locked
in, so you can respond appropriately if
they’re a hit or a miss with your customers.
For example, a vague description of
“Oven-roasted chicken drumstick” on your
cycle menu allows you change seasonings,
add sauces or switch up your side dishes.
That oven drumstick can be made with
traditional herbs and served with gravy and
mashed potatoes the first time it appears on
the menu, but steeped in an Asian sauce
and offered with brown rice the next time
and made BBQ-style with roasted vegetables for the third appearance.
A common misperception about cycle
menus is that you can’t incorporate fresh
fruits and vegetables, considering that
produce availability is seasonal—and even
then, not always reliable, given uncontrollable factors like weather. In Portland, the
Nutrition Services team develops seasonal
cycle menus specifically for produce items.
Each Thursday in the early fall months,
students enjoy juicy locally grown watermelon. When the fruit is no longer available—or the quality starts to decline—the
team switches it up to serve apples or
bananas. A best practice to manage
expectations and maintain flexibility is to
avoid publicizing the specific produce item
on the customer’s menu too far in advance.
Try out this wording on your published
menu: “Each lunch is served with a variety of
fruits and vegetables.”
Keep in mind the fact that the cycle
menu you develop for your operation does
not have to be an exact duplicate of the one
you will publish—in print and online—for
your customers. There’s no requirement that
using cycle menus means that you must
publish them for the entire school year on
opening day. Give yourself some latitude to
Why Are Cycle Menus More Efficient?
I
mproved efficiency is one of the most
significant benefits of using a cycle menu
and standardized recipes. Through repetition, your kitchen team will become experts on
preparing recipes to specifications and meet
customer expectations for consistency and
quality. As staff grow more confident in
prepping familiar menus, they can work more
quickly, which will improve meal-per-hour
costs.
All production records and HACCP steps can
be established for the kitchen team once the
menu is developed! This means that employee
training related to the menu can be concentrated at the beginning of the school year.
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Cycle menus also offer efficiencies in managing the documentation required for school meal
compliance. In addition to production records,
you will be able to collect product data sheets,
nutrient analyses and many of the other materials you need to have on hand for the next
Administrative Review by the state agency.
You will also discover cost efficiencies when
you use cycle menus. Costs can be reduced because larger quantities of food can be ordered
at one time or at specified times throughout
the year. The larger quantity that you order,
the more cost savings you are likely to see from
your manufacturer and distributor.
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identify the specific details with less lead
time. Even then, however, you’ll want to
make certain that you always have a “Menus
are subject to change” disclaimer on
whatever has been publicized in advance.
Step Four: Review, Revise and Review
Again Implementing a cycle menu is a
year-long process. It involves ongoing
research—testing new recipes, trying new
products at food shows (such as SNA’s
Annual National Conference Exhibit Hall)
and inviting manufacturers to bring new
items to your district (especially those
referenced by colleagues in other districts or
seen in ads in School Nutrition). You need to
collect feedback from students through a
variety of means, from anecdotal responses
to the samples offered on the serving line to
focus groups to surveys. You also want to
engage staff, learning how products and
recipes performed, modifications that
needed to be made and their observations
of student behaviors.
After collecting feedback during the
school year, you may want to use the
summer months to fine-tune and revise
recipes, rather than trying to develop these
in the middle of the hectic school year. If
that timing doesn’t work for your operation,
you can incorporate changes throughout the
year. Use of a cycle menu does not mean
you—or your students—are locked into
choices that simply don’t work.
Start the Cycle Feeling more motivated
to give cycle menus a try? Don’t feel
compelled to jump into the deep end of the
pool with a complex six-week lunch menu
featuring multiple entrée and side dish
choices! You can start with just one part of
the menu—consider the seasonal produce
cycle menu that Portland uses to manage
the purchase and menuing of fresh fruits and
vegetables. Or begin with one of your
smaller programs with less participation and
menu variety, such as breakfast or summer
meals. Choose a length of time that will give
you some flexibility for creativity and variety.
Remember, cycle menus do not have to be
boring for you or your student customers.
Use this tool to your operational advantage—and to meet their expectations. SN
Whitney Ellersick, MS, RDN, is the assistant
director of Portland (Ore.) Public Schools’ Nutrition
Services department. SNA members can log in
www.schoolnutrition.org/ANC2015/Presentations to
view the PowerPoint slides from her 2015 Annual
National Conference presentation, “Cycle
Menuing.”
To Your Credit: For CEUs toward the
SNA Certification in School Nutrition, complete
the “To Your Credit” test on page 60.
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• NOVEMBER 2015