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Project ResultsOur baseline data collection indicates that about 33% of children eat a serving of fruits and vegetables as part of their school provided lunch on any given day. This rate increases by 1 percentage point for each grade and is about 7.8 percentage points higher for girls. Our project will eventually have baseline data from 83 schools, with over 200,000 child-day observations. This data will provide a rich source to better understand which items children are most likely to eat and which they throw away. Based on data that we have collected so far, here is some information about which fruit and vegetable items are served the most often during lunch and which are the most popular with children.  Our data also allows us to examine the degree to which different approaches increase the fraction of children eating fruits and vegetables during lunch. One approach is to increase the variety of items that are offered during lunch. The following figure shows the number of fruit and vegetable items that were served per day at schools that we observed (the Y-axis indicates what fraction of days we observe that number of items being provided).  We find that the fraction of children eating fruits and vegetables increases by 3.3 percentage points for each additional fruit or vegetable item that is offered.  Another approach that many schools have tried and will become part of the new lunch guidelines it to switch from “offer” to “serve” and place fruit and vegetable items directly on each child’s tray. We evaluated this approach using two comparisons. The first was to compare the consumption and waste rates across school districts with different policies (the figure on the left) and the second was to compare the consumption and waste rates at a set of schools that change their policy. In the key below “default” refers to whether the items were placed automatically on the child’s tray.  These results suggest, in the best case scenario, that requiring items be placed automatically on each child’s tray will increase the consumption of fruits and vegetables by 8 percentage points but result in a dramatic increase in the number of servings that are thrown away. A rough estimate based on the costs of these items suggests that this policy leads to $1.72 in fruits and vegetables in the trash for each additional serving of fruits and vegetables that ends up in a child’s stomach. We have also implemented a small rewards program at 15 schools. In our initial pilot of this approach we used a variety of different types of rewards, including small cash rewards and raffle tickets for prizes. The figure below shows the change in the fraction of children who ate a serving of fruits and vegetables across each of the different types of rewards.  We also provide the results separately for each school that participated but report the percentage point change in the fraction of children eating fruits and vegetables.  
The results indicate that immediate rewards generally have a larger
effect and that small cash rewards work better than receiving a raffle ticket for a larger prize. However, there are a number of
concerns about using cash rewards in educational settings and so we have developed a special veggie token that children can earn
during lunch. Schools can allow children to use these tokens at the school store or contribute them to a common pile to be used
for a larger school goal. We are currently recruiting schools to participate in this part of the research project. If your school
would like to participate please contact us at veggies@byu.edu. | |||
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