Tyson puts lunches to the test to ensure they’re kid-friendly

If taste-testers object, no menu spot

When it comes to school lunches, Tyson Inc. takes kids seriously.

So seriously that if one of its products gets less than a 78.5 percent approval rating from a jury of young taste testers, it is pulled from the menu.

Before a product appears on the lunch line, it is taste tested by as many as 1,000 school-age children. If it gets a thumb’s down from 21.5 percent of the children, the company’s chefs and dietitians are sent back to the kitchen.

“If we don’t get 78.5 percent, we don’t take it to the next phase. We figure out why and see how we can do better,” said Michael Turley, vice president and general manager of government sales for the company. “Flavor is so important. If kids don’t eat it, we haven’t accomplished anything.”

For 30 years, Tyson has been providing products to the National School Lunch program. Tyson sells its school-lunch products to 41 of the 238 Arkansas school districts, as well as about 6,000 districts nationally.

Four years ago, the U.S. Agriculture Department set new meal requirements called the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which included more lower calorie items with whole grain rich foods, reduced fat and reduced sodium items in school lunchrooms.

“We were headed down that route well before there was a requirement to do so,” said Turley, adding Tyson began research and development into creating wholegrain products in 2009. “We knew it was the right thing to do.”

Robert Ginder, general manager of nutrition services for Bentonville schools, said that the district uses only Tyson products, unless items are sold out.

“Occasionally we don’t have enough of Tyson’s foods, then Sysco [a food-service company] offers substitutes,” he said. “Ninety percent of Tyson products are sold in our schools.”

Ginder said the children like most of the lunch items created by Tyson, with the exception of its newest item, Peruvian chicken. The white meat chunks look like popcorn chicken, but instead of a grain-battered outer crust,it is glazed with a spicy sauce.

“We served the spicy chicken in elementary schools last week, and it was a quite bit spicier than we expected,” Ginder said. “The children do want spicy, but they don’t want it to be too hot.”

Finding a happy medium is a delicate situation because “the younger kids are finicky,” Ginder said.

Tyson also works with some schools to design complete meals.

“We take things that schools commonly purchase and find commonality across the schools to create a meal design,” Turley said. “We like to focus on things the school can actually execute with items they already buy.”

For instance, the company suggests fresh spinach atop whole grain-breaded chicken patties with a light cream sauce.

Melinda Losey, food service director for the Jessieville School District, said that any chicken item, especially a breaded one, is accepted by the children.

“The kids love anything that is a chicken patty, nugget or strip, but chicken strip day is always the biggest sales day,” she said. “If it doesn’t crunch, they don’t really want to eat it.”

She said that the new whole grain-breaded patties offered by Tyson are consumed without a second thought.

“They haven’t noticed the difference in the breading; I don’t think they know,” Losey said with a giggle.

Next year, the USDA will require that all bread and breaded products are whole grain.

Business, Pages 73 on 03/23/2014

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