Technical Tools - Commodities
The mystery of the USDA Commodity system will be unraveled in our Lunch Box Commodity area. How does a school use and manage its commodity allocation if they want to produce fresh meals? Does your state help or hinder your school’s desire to use brown box? Why isn’t brown box 8-cut chicken packed IQF? Why does every state have a different approach to handling and distributing commodity foods? All this and more in our Phase II launch. We’ll be announcing when it goes live!
Food Distribution 2000 - Transforming Food Distribution for the Next Millenium
This report gives us a historical perspective on why our commodities are distributed in the current fashion:
"The commodity program in schools has two primary objectives. One is to assist U.S.
agricultural producers by buying products under price-support and surplus-removal programs.
The other is to support the school lunch program by providing nutritious, high-quality food to
school children. These two objectives should be met in an effective and efficient manner so that
as much money as possible is used to purchase food and as little as possible is wasted or spent
on nonvalue added activities. Each dollar that goes for unnecessary storage or other nonvalue
added costs -- and each dollar that goes for food that kids won’t eat -- is a dollar wasted."
The Federal Child Nutrition Commodity Program A Report on Nutritional Quality September 2008
California Food Policy Advocates (CFPA) and Samuels & Associates (S&A), with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Healthy Eating Research Program, conducted a study to determine the impact of the federal child nutrition commodity program on the nutritional quality of school meals, particularly those served in California.
The research was undertaken because commodity foods are a substantial component of the school meal programs, which in turn are an important contributor to the environment in which nearly 30 percent of school age children are identified as obese or overweight and therefore are at risk of multiple severe (and costly) medical consequences. About 3 million California students participate daily in the National School Lunch Program, and 1 million participate in the School Breakfast Program. The two meals together provide over half the students’ recommended daily dietary allowances.
USDA Commodity Foods in School Lunch - A School Food Focus Brief
Nationwide, 15 to 20 percent of the food on school lunch plates is government commodity, supplied through a program called USDA Foods, administered by the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS). Originally conceived during the 1930s to help stabilize the farm economy, it was installed in the National School Lunch Program* (NSLP) in 1946 and has been a fixture ever since. In 2009, USDA Foods provided nearly 1.2 million dollars worth of commodity food to schools1 via state and regional administrative agencies.
Today, USDA Foods still has the dual purpose of meeting both the economic needs of farmers and the nutritional needs of children. This does not mean that schools are restricted to the excess product the government wants to keep out of the marketplace. In fact, most of the food that goes to schools through the program, so-called “entitlement commodity,” is carefully ordered and planned for. A second, much smaller supply of “bonus commodities” is an offloading of unexpected agricultural surplus. These foods, offered to districts in addition to their regular entitlement, comprise less than two percent of total commodity distributed to schools.