California became the first state in the nation to mandate removal of certain ultra-processed foods in school meals through the 2025 Real Food, Healthy Kids Act. However, a recent study published in the Public Health Nutrition journal reports that schools may face many challenges in making a transition from reliance on ultra-processed food items to scratch-cooked school meals. Given that school meals can contribute up to 50% of children’s caloric intake, reducing ultra-processed foods in school meals may make a significant difference in a child’s diet. Researchers surveyed and interviewed 20 food service directors from rural and urban California San Joaquin Valley school districts to examine the perceived barriers and facilitators to providing children with scratch-cooked lunches. An Advisory Board composed of relevant partners used the study findings to develop recommendations for increasing scratch cooking in schools.
The school food service directors identified several obstacles to increased scratch-cooking, such as inadequate kitchen equipment and other facilities, difficulties related to the procurement of more fresh foods, and lack of trained staff. Suggestions to overcome these barriers ranged from continued investment in school meals, for example, to hire, train, and retain kitchen staff and to update kitchen infrastructure, to fostering food hubs and simplifying required contracting processes in order to facilitate procurement of fresh and minimally-processed food items.
This study was featured in a Scholars Strategy Network research brief and by various media outlets such as Stanford Medicine News, Stanford Report, Medical Xpress and US News, highlighting the importance of the transition from ultra-processed to scratch-cooked meals in schools.
The paper, published in Public Health Nutrition, was co-authored by Andrea Pedroza-Tobias, Donna Matheson, Alix Duran Gomez, Anjali Gupta, Aditi Sharma, and Anisha Patel with Sanford University School of Medicine, Ashley de la Rosa with the Dolores Huerta Foundation, Deiglis Delgado and Genoveva Islas with Cultiva La Salud, and Lorrene Ritchie, Christina Hecht, and Kenneth Hecht with the Nutrition Policy Institute. This research was funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases DREAMS Center for Diabetes Translation Research, Stanford Maternal and Child Health Research Institute, William and Nancy Thompson Family Foundation, Stanford Impact Labs, and National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health.