School breakfast is your opportunity to give students a healthy start to their day. But if your students aren’t keen on eating breakfast at all, you may need to rethink your breakfast menu.

The team at Belton School District 124 in Belton, MO decided to revamp their breakfast menu to encourage more students to eat breakfast at school.

See how Belton revamped their breakfast:

First, they sought feedback from their students to understand where to make improvements. Having this perspective gave them areas to focus and gave their staff an understanding of why menu changes were necessary.

Because of the student feedback they collected, the district began scratch cooking more breakfast options, such as their Turkey Sausage Breakfast Pizza recipe, which soon became a student favorite. Next, they implemented a “second chance” breakfast option. This change arose from noticing many students weren’t hungry when they first arrived at school. So, instead of only offering breakfast at 7 a.m., the district began offering breakfast again later at 9 a.m. and found more students ate breakfast.

The district also made efforts to reduce the amount of added sugars at breakfast. To do this, they analyzed the cereal and yogurt they were serving and collaborated with their food service provider to find new options that were lower in added sugars and still tasted great. These efforts led to Belton earning the Small and/or Rural School Food Authority (SFA) Breakfast Trailblazer award, as part of the USDA Food and Nutrition Service’s Healthy Meals Incentives (HMI) Initiative.

These menu changes at breakfast not only improved the taste and nutritional quality of school breakfast at Belton, but they saw a big jump in their participation rates. Students are now excited to eat breakfast at school, and the district takes great pride in knowing more of their students are taking advantage of this.

Congratulations to the team at Belton for making these improvements to their breakfast menu!

Stay tuned for more Cafeteria Chronicles stories from school districts nationwide. Check out our Cafeteria Chronicles Blog for more inspiring school nutrition transformations!