Case Study: Forrest City School District (AR)

Overview
Forrest City School District consists of five schools in eastern Arkansas. Each day the cafeteria staff of 39 serves nearly 3,800 students. In 2010-2012 they served over 375,000 breakfasts, 539,000 lunches and 16,000 after school snacks.

District Obstacles
When Child Nutrition Director Evelyn Rayford first came to Forrest City Schools over 15 years ago there was no point of sale system in place. Cashiers spent hours writing down children’s names on notecards to distribute to the classrooms. After the students brought their cards in for breakfast, a cashier spent a few more hours organizing the cards for redistribution and the process was repeated again at lunchtime. It was hours of tedious and repetitive work that tied up a cashier that could have been helping with any of the multiple tasks associated with running a cafeteria. It was time for a change.

Finding the Answer
When the district was building a new high school, Evelyn took advantage of the opportunity. She began researching point of sale systems to implement and decided to start with the brand new school. So she did what most food service directors do – she asked her neighboring districts what they were using. She learned some popular systems were actually causing headaches for other child nutrition directors so she decided to find something different. She found Meals Plus and its 30 day free cafeteria software trial gave her the opportunity to explore the system on her own time. And to her delight she found easy-to-generate ID cards, one-click reporting and an easy-to-use point of sale system for her cafeteria staff that had never used a POS system before.

Results
The system was such a success at the high school that the following year she implemented Meals Plus in the other four schools in the district. And after “14 years of satisfaction” with Meals Plus, she found the need to explore other components to the system. The Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act demanded a reliable and accurate menu planning and nutritional analysis system. Evelyn and her team are excited to add Menus, Inventory Management and Production Records to their Meals Plus Suite and look to add additional components in the future.

To read about more districts that are seeing the “Meals Plus Difference”, check out our other case studies!

Point_of_sale_hardware_system