Maryann Durrant (USBE):
The food chart outlines what meals and snacks must look like at your centers in order to be claimed for reimbursement. You are able to serve more than the portion size listed on the chart, but not less or else you would not be able to claim that meal for reimbursement. This chart provides your cooks and staff with required components and portion sizes that need to be served within each meal service in order to claim that meal for reimbursement. We will refer to this chart frequently during the training, if you don’t already have a copy of the chart printed off, you can print off the copy that has been uploaded into Canvas.
We’ll go through the components that are required for each meal and snack and then go into more detail with the individual components. For each breakfast that you claim, you would need to serve milk, a fruit or vegetable or both, and a grain item in the specified serving sizes. At the bottom of the food chart, you can see that it tells you that a meat/meat alternate can replace the grain serving up to three times a week. This is a great way to increase the variety of foods that you’re serving. You can see that next to breakfast it says that offer versus serve is available. We’ll discuss offer versus serve in another training.
For snacks, you would need to serve two of the five components in the specified serving sizes. You could choose to serve celery and peanut butter, cheese and whole grain crackers, fruit and yogurt and on and on. There is a lot flexibility with snacks, try to avoid getting in a rut with the snacks that you serve.
Lunch and supper requires the most components to be served. You must serve all of the five components in at least the minimum serving size to meet the requirements. There are a variety of meat or meat alternate options listed because different meat/meat alternate foods have different serving sizes. You can see that if you’re serving cottage cheese, you would need to serve 4 oz or for it to meet the 2 oz serving size requirement. If you’re serving a product that is not on this chart and you’re not sure about the serving size you can contact our office.
Another aspect of lunch or supper is that you could serve 2 different vegetables instead of a fruit AND a vegetable to meet the requirements. For example, rather than serving carrots and apples with a sandwich, you could serve carrots and broccoli and as long as you are serving enough of each component to meet the required serving sizes, you would be in compliance.
When planning the meals you serve, you will want to keep in mind that you can combine more than one food item in order to meet the minimum portion sizes for each component served. For example, if a center serves 1/8 Cup of carrots and 1/8 Cup of broccoli the portion met for the vegetable component would be ¼ Cup. No less than 1/8 Cup portion sizes is creditable when serving fruits and vegetables on the food program. When meat/meat alternates are being served no less than ¼ of an ounce may be served. When a combination of grains are served, at least ¼ of a serving of grains must be offered.
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