TDOE consultant demonstrates USDA Food Buying Guide tools, calculator and Exhibit A for school meal crediting

A Northwest Regional Nutrition Consultant for the Tennessee Department of Education led a webinar demonstration of the USDA Food Buying Guide, showing school nutrition staff how to use the guide’s interactive search, Exhibit A grain chart and the Food Buying Guide Calculator to determine meal-pattern crediting and purchasing quantities.

The consultant said the session would cover “crediting in child nutrition programs, crediting individual components utilizing the food buying guide, and then . . . the food buying guide itself,” and walked participants through examples for vegetables, meat/meat alternates, grains and fresh fruit.

The demonstration reviewed four accepted forms of crediting for National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program compliance: the USDA Food Buying Guide, Child Nutrition (CN) labels, product formulation sheets and USDA Foods/Schools product information sheets for commodity items. The presenter opened the Food Buying Guide web tool, explained the choice to continue as guest or create a profile (profiles can save favorites and shopping lists), and showed the landing-page features: food-item search, Exhibit A (grain chart), the Food Buying Guide Calculator and a raw recipe analysis workbook.

Using the food-item search, the consultant showed how the guide displays the meal component (for example, vegetable), subcategory (for example, red/orange vegetable), "food as purchased" (for example, fresh without tops), purchase unit (for example, pounds), edible servings per purchase unit, and the meal contribution serving size (default: 1/4 cup). She demonstrated that changing the meal contribution (for example, to 1/2 cup) automatically recalculates portions per purchase unit and the pounds needed for a target number of servings. “If you wanted to have 100 servings of this, that we would need to order 19.6 pounds,” the consultant said in an example about carrots, showing the tool’s unit conversions and yield adjustments.

On meat and meat alternates, the presenter noted that the food-item search uses a 1-ounce contribution as the baseline for many meat/alternate entries and demonstrated a compare feature that isolates multiple items side by side for export as PDF.

For grains the webinar covered two methods of crediting: looking up specific products in the food-item search (for example, two graham crackers can provide a 1/2-ounce grain contribution if they weigh at least 14 grams) and using Exhibit A, which lists grain groups, required final-baked weights and footnotes. The presenter pointed out that items flagged in red on Exhibit A are identified as grain-based desserts and, per the current guidance, are not creditable for pre-K or after-school snacks this school year.

The consultant worked through a practical grain example: crackers and croutons in a grab-and-go salad. Using the grain-group requirements (Group A items must weigh 22 grams to credit as a 1-ounce equivalent), she showed how three 14-gram packs of crackers (42 grams) plus a 7-gram pack of croutons would total 49 grams and therefore meet the 44-gram requirement for a 2-ounce grain equivalent for that meal.

The webinar included a fresh-produce example for strawberries. The consultant showed that, for the variety and preparation chosen in the guide (fresh, whole strawberries), a pound yields 10.5 one-quarter-cup servings; to produce half-cup servings that is 5.25 servings per pound, which implies each half-cup portion weighs about 3.05 ounces. Using that figure, 300 half-cup servings require roughly 915 ounces, which converts to about 57.2 pounds. The presenter advised ordering more than the minimum to account for variation in fruit size and preparation differences. (The transcript contains an inconsistent statement that lists “approximately 48 pounds”; that figure is a transcription error and the calculator math above is the correct conversion based on the example shown.)

The Food Buying Guide Calculator demonstration showed how to build a shopping list by program (for example, National School Lunch Program), grade group and serving-size contributions. In one example the presenter entered a turkey product to credit as 2-ounce servings and requested 252 servings; the calculator returned an exact required quantity of about 54.82 pounds and rounded the purchase units to 55 pounds. For canned vegetables the presenter showed the calculator subtracting on-hand inventory (for example, six #10 cans on hand reduced a calculated need from 12.78 cans to a purchase of seven additional #10 cans).

The consultant described two supplemental resources she created for frontline staff: a printable, laminated quick-reference sheet listing commonly used fresh vegetables and fruits with corresponding edible-portion weights for a half-cup serving (examples: broccoli florets ~1.11 ounces per half-cup; baby carrots ~2.48 ounces per half-cup; apples ~2.2 ounces per half-cup edible portion) and a step-by-step guide for weighing produce using a digital scale and tare weight procedures. She said the sheets will include the Food Buying Guide references and that she expects to update images and route the files to graphic design before release.

Throughout the session the presenter encouraged attendees to use the guide’s search and calculator functions, to weigh initial batches of fresh produce to create visual templates for portioning, and to save shopping lists in a profile if they want persistent records. She closed by thanking participants, noting the session would be recorded and distributed, and asking attendees to complete the evaluation.

The webinar did not include formal votes or policy changes; it was an instructional presentation aimed at helping school nutrition staff comply with federal meal-pattern crediting and streamline ordering and portioning tasks.