It helps to find out what your school already offers in terms of fruit and vegetable options, so that you can work on ways to improve or change the school’s offerings. The Marketing Environment Survey is adapted from the CDC’s School Health Index. It is designed to be a planning tool, so that once you’ve evaluated the current "market" you can write a list of actions that would improve the marketplace. You can modify, add, or delete from these items based on your research plan.

Leading the Way to 5 A Day Marketing Survey

Based on your survey results, you may decide to focus on improving appearance, availability, or affordability of fruit and vegetables in your school. Or you may choose to combine different strategies, such as improving the appearance of cafeteria fruits and vegetables while increasing the number of fruits and vegetables sold in your school store. Either way, the information below is designed to help make your ideas a reality.

Focus on Fruit and Vegetable Appeal

If your school offers fruit and vegetable choices that sound appetizing when you read the menu but look awful on the cafeteria line, consider ways to improve the display for fruit and vegetable dishes:

Simple decorations such as baskets for fruits, or garnishes surrounding vegetable dishes, can make a big difference in how the product is perceived. Are fruits and vegetables positioned prominently, or are the bananas buried behind pretzels? Rearranging 100% fruit juice and fresh fruit so that they are easily accessible will make it more likely that students will choose these options. Are vegetable dishes located at the end of the line, where students have already filled their plates? If so, food service may be willing to move the placement of vegetable dishes. Promote fruit and vegetable dishes meeting 5 A Day guidelines with a special star or logo, with posters describing health benefits. Do the fresh fruits look bruised or overripe? Work with the cafeteria staff to maintain high standards of quality for the display. As they say, "one bad apple spoils the bunch", and consumers will pass over products that appear damaged.

After determining ways to spruce up the produce, set up a meeting with the food service manager to discuss how you can work together to increase fruit and vegetable sales in the cafeteria. Improving displays in the cafeteria helps both your campaign as well as school food service, because it has the potential to improve sales. The food service manager may be willing to track sales of fruits and vegetables before and after you make display changes, so that you can measure the effect of your efforts on demand for fruits and vegetables.

If the cafeteria features french fries as their produce option, your campaign would benefit from finding ways to increase offerings of fruits and vegetables within your school:

1. Know your options. Meet with school food service to discuss ways you can work together to improve offerings. For example, if your market research results indicated students wanted a salad bar, or a certain vegetable dish sold by a local restaurant, would food service be willing to try to accommodate these requests? In designing your market research tool, it is important to have feasible solutions to problems that are identified.
2. Know the preferences of your customer: find out whether the demand is for a salad bar, fresh fruit display, or a particular vegetable dish, so you can focus your efforts on increasing access to desirable options. Here are some ideas about ways to find out what your classmates want:

   • Conduct a survey in the cafeteria asking students to prioritize which of the suggestions is most appealing. In order to increase survey participation, you could enter all the people who have completed surveys into a raffle for a prize donated by a local business.
   • Taste tests. One of the best ways to find out what students prefer is to provide all of the options and ask students to rate them. If food service agrees, you could hold a fruit and vegetable recipe contest among students, where the winning dish would be featured on the cafeteria menu. The winner of the recipe contest could be rewarded with a gift certificate to a local restaurant or business. The following links provide fruit and vegetable recipe ideas for school food service:

   • The American School Food Service Association provides a searchable database of recipes for school food service.
   • Industry groups have also compiled recipe suggestions for food service

3. Meet with school food service or the school board to make recommendations based on your market research results. It is important both to raise awareness that a problem exists and to provide potential solutions.

      4.  Give school food service resources to help them implement your recommendations:

• Gimme 5, another high school fruit and vegetable promotion program, provided Fresh Choice Guidelines to help school food service prepare fruits and vegetables according to 5 A Day criteria
• The USDA’s School Meals Initiative provides guidelines to school food service for buying fruits and vegetables.
• Recipes provided by the National Cancer Institute’s 5 A Day website. If possible, recommend recipes taste tested by your classmates

Competitive Foods in School

• Many foods are available beyond what is offered by your school cafeteria (who must follow basic USDA nutrition guidelines). These are called "competitive foods" and include food sales from vending machines, fund raising by school clubs, concession stands, and school stores.
• Did you know . . .

• Nearly all schools (98% of high schools) have vending machines or school stores where students can purchase food and beverages.
• Most (71%) allow purchases of competitive foods during lunch periods and nearly half (43%) allow the purchase of these foods during school hours when meals are not being served.
• Most common competitive foods sold in high schools (percentage of schools selling):
  • Drinks (soft drinks, sports drinks, and fruit drinks)94%
  • Salty snacks (not low in fat) 83%
  • Baked goods (not low in fat) 81%
  • Candy (non chocolate) 75%
  • Candy (chocolate) 72%
• Least common competitive foods sold in high schools (percentage of schools selling):
  • Low fat yogurt 21%
  • Fruits and vegetables 22%
  • 1% or skim milk 23%

• And who makes most of the money from students buying these competitive foods?

• Nearly half of all schools or school boards have contracts with food vending companies.

• These schools or school boards receive a percentage of the sales, receive incentives for increased sales, and even allow the vending company to advertise in the school as part of the contract.

For more information on competitive foods in schools, see The Food Research and Action Center.

For more information on competitive food policies in states, go to The National Conference of State Legislators.

What you can do to change the type of competitive foods available:

Within your school, talk to clubs and other organizations that sell food for fund raising efforts. Ask them to replace some of the less healthy options with fruits and vegetables (e.g. fruit juices or water instead of soft drinks, apples or oranges instead of cookies, dried fruits instead of candy). The Produce for Better Health Foundation provides a directory of vending machine distributors as well as fundraising options offering fruits and vegetables. Decide which fundraising options match your school’s needs, and promote these opportunities by sending a flyer to athletic teams and other organizations. Find out who handles the contract for vending companies at your school. Is the contract with your school or with your school district? Who is responsible for this contract? Ask to meet with them, describe your fruit and vegetable campaign, and ask about the specifics of the vending contract, including the ways in which the contract can be changed now and when it is up for renewal. Lobby for changing the vending contract.

1. Can the school work with a vendor of healthier foods (e.g. fruit juices, low fat yogurts, salads to go), including even with local farmers and grocery stores, to supply competitive foods in your school?
2. If not, can the school or school district at least work with the existing vendor to change the selections of foods available?
3. If direct discussions do not work, use increased public awareness of the issue (press releases, notices to parents, presentations at the PTA, speaking before the school board) to exert additional pressure to change the contract for food and beverage vending services at your school. Write your local school board representative, the school superintendent, your city or county representative, and/or your local state legislator. Make them aware of the issue and ask for their help.
4. If the student body is serious about wanting healthier food options, consider organizing a boycott of existing vending services. Nothing changes the minds of companies and schools like decreased revenues from vending sales. Provide alternative healthy food selections to compete with the vending machines (e.g. sell fruit juices and water at a stand next to the soft drink machine; sell dried fruit next to the candy machine) and encourage students not to buy from commercial food and beverage companies in your school until changes are made to offer healthier selections.

For a step by step guide on changing nutrition and health policies at your school, check out:

http://www.caprojectlean.org/teensactout/makedifference/default.asp

If your school serves an area that has local farming, check out the farm to school program, which encourages both healthy fruit and vegetable consumption at school by also supporting the local farmers in the area.

State and National Policy on School Nutrition and Increasing Fruit and Vegetable Consumption

Although you can make the greatest policy difference by working with your school and school district to reduce or change the types of competitive foods available at your school, you may want to reach out beyond local school policy and become involved in other nutrition policy topics at the state and national level.

• For information on a range of nutrition policy topics and how you and your school can help, check out the nutrition policy section of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. This site provides information on national and state legislation involving nutrition policy (some school related) as well as links to other nutrition policy and advocacy sites.

• The Produce For Better Health Foundation’s 5 A Day site also provides information on recent national and state policy issues related to increased fruit and vegetable consumption:

What Other Schools Have Done

Middle School A La Carte – The American School Food Service Association described the following program to increase the availability of fruits and vegetables in a school:

The Cajon Valley Union School District's Child Nutrition Services' department made a commitment to promote the 5 A Day principles. One strategy was to fill a wire mesh basket, lined with a colorful napkin, with a variety of fresh seasonal fruit, including Washington and Gala apples, sliced kiwi, sliced oranges, and bunches of grapes. The basket was placed at the beginning of the service line near the plate and utensil area, at the windows, or on top of a la carte lines, and delivered to the student stores. At the end of the day the leftover fruit was refrigerated. The following day, the cafeteria manager would remove the fruit basket from the refrigerator, discard overripe fruit, add fresh fruit, and return the basket to the service line. All children were encouraged to select fresh fruit before starting the lunch line. In November 2001, the production kitchen reported a 75% increase, compared to the school site's November 2000 orders for fresh fruit. It was learned that children will select fresh fruit when offered a wide variety on a daily basis at all food source points.