The Online Business Center

Archive for December, 2008

Prior to SB 19 schools had become progressively more dependent on revenues from the sale of high calorie, nutrient poor foods and beverages to support various student programs and activities as well as provide much needed revenue to school food service departments that struggle to keep their operations in the black. Faced with competition from venues such as vending machines, student stores and students going off campus to buy foods and beverages during the school day, many food service departments have felt it necessary to sell popular, but nutritionally-poor, a la carte items in addition to complete meals.

Many schools expressed concern that sale of SB-19 com-pliant foods and beverages would be less profi table and thereby negatively impact school revenues, however, schools did not have systems in place that accurately assessed this fi nancial impact. Many schools had little idea how much they were making from competitive food and beverage sales, and rarely were revenues adjusted for student attendance, therefore making it diffi cult to distinguish the impact of the regulations from the impact of fl uctuations in student enrollment.

Enormous attention, effort, and resources are being paid to the obesity epidemic and the related health consequences. The nation’s children in particular are facing a health crisis — the number of overweight and obese children is rising at a rapid rate. In response to accelerating childhood obesity rates, states and school districts have developed, passed and implemented policies to restrict sales of certain foods or beverages and to set nutrition standards for “competitive foods”— foods sold on school campuses outside of school meal programs. Likewise, legislative proposals have been considered at the state and federal levels to address the presence of unhealthy foods in schools.

In California, the state legislature responded to the increasing rates of childhood obesity by passing The Pupil Nutrition, Health and Achievement Act of 2001, commonly known as SB 19, which attempted to regulate the sale of com-petitive food and beverage items sold to elementary and middle school students on campus. SB19 imposed nutrition standards (summarized in Table 1) that specifi cally limited the fat and sugar content of these snack foods and beverages. Although SB 19 was signed into law it never went into effect due to a funding contingency. The SB 19nutrition standards however were modifi ed slightly and incorporated into subsequent legislation (SB 12 and 965) which were signed into law and apply to all grade levels (K-12) starting in July of 2008, with the exception of the beverage standards which will be phased in over 2 years at high schools.

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