School meals made healthier with new planning tool

An innovative free School Meals Planner developed at Imperial College London is improving the nutritional intake of millions of schoolchildren. The tool, for the first time, enables users to plan nutritionally balanced and fully costed school meals using locally available food. Developed by Imperial's Partnership for Child Development and trialled by the Ghana School Feeding Programme, the School Meals Planner was unveiled at the Global Child Nutrition Forum 2014 earlier this month. The audience of 250 school feeding experts, including 12 state Ministers, drawn from 40 countries, welcomed the chance to learn from and replicate the success of the Ghana trial. "Creating a nutritionally balanced school menu using local ingredients is not an easy thing to do, especially when you are working within a tight budget," said Dr Lesley Drake , Executive Director of the PCD at Imperial. "This is doubly true when the children relying on your school meals are from communities where food insecurity is high and malnutrition and anaemia are common conditions." The tool, which is available both online and offline, employs gingerbread men to show visually if a meal is meeting the recommended daily intake of nutrients as identified by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Health Organisation. By linking local market prices for the ingredients, the planner shows the user the actual cost of each meal.