Our Home and School also runs a hot lunch program. I spent a year researching a program (I had tried to convince Mike to design us a program but it wasn't a fit) and finally found a great program that our entire school district now uses. The company that sells the software is Aurora Enterprises and their website is
Aurora Enterprises
. Click on software and then hot lunch. The program is a lifesaver for us.
We purchased PTO Manager primarily to help coordinate the volunteers needed to run our daily hot lunch needs. We were pleasantly surprised at how great PTO Manager worked for us for all committees, not just hot lunch, and how great is was as a communication tool. We couldn't live without it now.
I am just now taking over the lunch program for my children's private school. Our school has always had an individual volunteer to run the program. That person has always done the cooking on three days of the week and on one day it's Taco Bell and another is Pizza. I'm looking for some new ways to do things and saw that you purchase entree's from a company. Can you post that information so that I can look into it? Thank you.
I do know a school that runs the hot lunch program. Feel free to call me at 800-557-2670 or email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and I can pass on their contact information (once I get the ok from them). I will try to get them to post on the board as well.
It's a private school. The lunch runs two days a week. The other days kids must bring their own lunches. It is a lot of work, however the process is also a lot of fun and builds a sense of community amoung the parents. Running the program also allows the parents to provide food that we really want our kids eating. We buy the entrees pre-made from suppliers that we think produce really high quality food (not stuffed with fillers and junk, but real meat, cheese, etc.) and the fruits and vegetables are delivered fresh from a local produce market that morning. We wash and cut the fruits and veggies and plate everything. The program is our largest fundraiser and largest volunteer effort. (Every parent whose child participates in the program must volunteer 3 hours a year or "pay-out". A dozen or so parents volunteer 1-5 hours a week). We're using the PTO manager for the volunteer end - but could use a database for the children's orders...
are you serious? Your parent group runs the lunch program? I have never heard of this, is there a reason why your group got the responsibiltity of it...lack of funding...etc. I am just curious as I never even assumed this was something that volunteers could or should do, what about all of the health regulations, do you guys have to be trained, things like that?
"When you stop learning you stop growing."
Our parent organization runs the hot lunch program at our school. Right now we are utilizing Excel to enter and sort the data for the program. We have been told that a database would be more efficient and sensible.
We enter every child's name who participates and whether they ordered the entree for the day "PZ" for Pizza for example, or whether they chose a substitute meal, such as "SJ" sunbutter and jam. Then on the day of the lunch, we print out the data in various ways: lists of the kids with what they ordered, number of entrees that we need to serve at 11:30am, at 12pm, etc. and # of substitutes ordered, etc.
We bought the PTO manager software this year - but as far as we can tell - this software works for our volunteer data, but would not work for the hot lunch data.
Is anyone running the lunch program at their school? How are you working with the data? Anybody else with ideas?
