School cafeterias are swapping dino-shaped chicken fingers for carrot purees. They’re trading mac ’n’ cheese for kale salsa and replacing potato chips with green smoothies.
These lunchrooms are part of a pilot program that FoodCorps, a national nonprofit that promotes healthy foods in schools, launched in March in partnership with Sweetgreen, a fast-casual salad chain. The program, Reimagining School Cafeterias, advocates for the adoption of locally grown produce in schools and offers curricula that emphasizes the importance of healthy eating. The goal is to give students more control over designing healthy school menus.
In March, Sweetgreen pledged $1 million to create scalable healthy eating and educational programming in 50 school cafeterias by 2020. Reimagining School Cafeterias builds off a previous nutrition-based curriculum of theirs called Sweetgreen in Schools. Sweetgreen in Schools launched in 2010 and reached 9,000 students. The new initiative aims to expand the number of students they reach and create demographic-specific learning opportunities for the students.
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