Weak rules and industry power have allowed ultra-processed products on the menu. Lunchables altered two of its products to meet federal school lunch standards.
PEMBROKE, N.C. — In his school’s vast, cacophonous lunchroom, Raylen Locklear stacked his Lunchables the way he has“Well, you put the cookie down first,” the second-grader said, setting out the cracker that comes in a brightly labeled package offered free to every student in Robeson County schools. “You put a ham,” he said, misidentifying the pinkish slice of turkey, a bit larger than a poker chip. “You put some cheese and then you put another cookie, and then you put the rest of the cheese.
A replica oversize Cheez-It at the School Nutrition Association conference in Denver on July 11. Kraft Heinz's booth for Lunchables at the conference. Amy Deal, mother of Raylen Locklear, said she was pleased to learn that Robeson County schools are offering the same fare free that she had been buying from the store. “It’s a time saver, but it’s also a healthy snack,” she said. “It’s things that he likes.”— industrially produced using additives that make food hyper-palatable — and obesity as well as chronic disease.
more than half the roughly $4 per lunch that public schools are allotted to pay for food, labor and supplies.“It’s a tightrope, trying to get that balance,” said Harrison Branch, a school nutrition handed out to conventioneers. Faux crackers as big as truck tires hung above the booth, alongside giant replica meat and cheese slices.
The Agriculture Department requires certain amounts of whole grains, protein, fruits and vegetables in school meals. “It is too easy for food manufacturers to reformulate sugar, salt and fat to meet standards for those nutrients and still produce a junk food,” said Marion Nestle, a retired professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University.Lunchables looks virtually identical to the one sold in stores. But Kraft Heinz has reformulated the nutritional content of the school version to qualify under Agriculture Department rules for the National School Lunch Program.
“At the national level, SNA’s Industry Advisory Council provides the Board of Directors information on critical issues, such as how supply chain disruptions are impacting K-12 procurement, and recommendations on industry programming at our conferences,” she said in a statement. Food industry money was evident all around the convention. Companies paid the association at least $2.4 million for booths displaying their merchandise, according to a Post examination of the floor map and price list from the 2023 convention. Schwan’s Company, a major supplier of pizza and frozen foods to schools, sponsored a party billed as a full dinner and open bar at
collectively received more than $1.3 million in industry money as of June, according to a Post examination of corporate sponsors listed on each state’s association website. Several of those websites touted company access to school nutrition directors and buyers who represent billions of dollars in purchasing power. Industry partners “are the life-blood of our organization,” Pennsylvania’s associationthe national association emailed ads for Lunchables to members last fall.
In an interview with The Post, Drane said he was surprised that Lunchables qualify as nutritious enough to be served in school cafeterias. His team constantly tinkered with the ingredients to improve the nutritional content, Drane said, but they couldn’t, conducted focus groups with children and discovered they thought assembling non-heated pizza components would be fun — despite their mothers’ strenuous objections, Drane said. Even his daughter would not feed Lunchables to her children.
approve the biggest revision in lunchroom nutrition standards in decades, the 2010 legislation was far from a total victory. Klobuchar, during her 2020 presidential bid, said she came to regret her defense of pizza sauce as a vegetable. “It was about trying to keep a company afloat in a really small town that employed a bunch of people,” she said during a
“We’ve learned a lot from the previous decade and have really tried to make a rule that reflects that,” she said. “We’re working very hard to craft standards that move school meals forward and that are doable for schools.” Thompson, who says he comes from a long line of dairy farmers, received more than $939,000 from businesses in the agriculture sector — which includes dairy farmers, meat producers and food manufacturers — in the 2021-2022 election cycle, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks money in politics.
As the United States fails to reach consensus on how to prioritize children’s nutrition, other developed countries have managed to serve students healthier school lunches and limit their exposure to ads for junk food.
turkey-and-cheddar option would be labeled with three octagons for high calories, saturated fat and sodium. The cheese pizza would carry two warnings — for saturated fat and sodium. The deficiencies in U.S. school lunches are glaring compared with meals eaten by children in Chile, which began to more tightly regulate school meals seven years ago to address childhood obesity,
Not everyone in the Robeson district accepts Lunchables as an inevitable part of the school diet. Richard Jones, who works in the school system mentoring Native American youth, said thePembroke schools are surrounded by farms. Peach orchards dot the neighboring county. The main difficulty in serving locally grown fare, school nutrition officials said, is that farmers must be certified by the USDA to provide food to schools, a sometimes cumbersome process for small growers.
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