School Nutrition Financial Management: Are You Broke and Don’t Know It?
May 16, 2025
Customer satisfaction surveys are a powerful tool that is often underutilized in school nutrition. However, while working to balance nutrition guidelines, student preferences, tight budgets, and staff shortages, evaluating customer satisfaction often gets pushed lower on the priority list (if it’s even there at all). We understand!
However, to strengthen relationships, increase participation, and build a culture of trust and communication, gathering feedback from students, teachers, school staff, parents, and community members is paramount. It’s not just about improving meals. Customer satisfaction surveys provide valuable insight into how your program is perceived by the people who matter most—your customers.
Who Are Your Customers?
Before diving into the benefits of customer satisfaction surveys, it’s important to clarify who your “customers” really are. School nutrition programs serve a variety of groups:
- Students: Your most direct and most important customers. Their preferences, perceptions, and habits directly impact participation.
- Teachers and School Staff: They may eat in the cafeteria, support or criticize the program, and influence student opinions.
- Parents: Especially for younger students, parents often decide whether children will eat school lunch or bring food from home.
- Administrators: While not always customers in the service line, administrators are stakeholders whose perceptions can influence your program’s funding and support.
Understanding and addressing the expectations of each group can lead to a more successful and well-supported program.
Why Customer Satisfaction Matters
You already track participation numbers. You might even peek into the trash cans to informally monitor what gets thrown away or get anecdotal feedback from staff.
But neither of those tells you how your customers feel and what they think. That’s where customer satisfaction surveys come in.
When done well, surveys can:
- Improve Meal Acceptance: Discover what students like or dislike about specific menu items.
- Increase Participation: When students feel heard and see changes made based on their input, they’re more likely to participate in school meals.
- Strengthen Communication: Shows parents and staff that you care about their opinions.
- Identify Opportunities: Helps uncover gaps or misperceptions that you may not be aware of.
- Justify Decisions: Survey data can support informed decisions regarding changes to menus, service models, or procurement practices.
- Support Staff Development: Feedback on service can guide staff training and morale-building efforts.
Current Research on Customer Satisfaction in School Nutrition
Research consistently shows the relationship between customer satisfaction and participation, as well as how school districts use stakeholder data to enhance participation. Here are a few examples.
USDA School Nutrition and Meal Cost Study
Using a nationally representative sample, the USDA School Nutrition and Meal Cost Study in April 2019 reported the following:
- Besides hunger, liking the food in general and ease and convenience were the most reported reasons for participating in the NSLP.
- Reasons for not eating lunch at school included a preference for eating lunch from home, a dislike for the food, or a parent’s preference for the child to eat lunch from home.
- These reasons for participating and not participating were similar for the SBP.
- Overall, the higher the quality of NSLP lunches as measured by the Healthy Eating Index, the higher the student participation.
- Surprisingly, offering foods in reimbursable meals that were brand name or from chain restaurants was associated with significantly lower NSLP participation.
The Kids' Safe and Healthful Food Project
A joint initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the School Meal Programs Innovate to Improve Student Nutrition was a national survey of 489 school food authority (SFA) directors that investigated how these directors were tackling the challenge of participation through the lens of customer satisfaction.
- Most SFA directors reported using at least one strategy to maintain or increase student participation in the meal programs, such as conducting assessments or surveys to evaluate the level of interest of students, parents, and the community in the meal programs.
- The SMART Expert Panel, a group of 11 food service directors noted for their success in navigating updated nutritional standards, described approaches they use to maintain or increase student participation. For example, they treat the cafeteria as a restaurant and the students as customers, and show that student feedback matters by offering more of the items they choose most often.
Strategies to Improve School Meal Consumption: A Sytematic Review
A systemic review in the journal of Nutrients of 96 studies reported seven strategies to increase the consumption of school meals.
Two of the strategies related to student preferences and satisfaction were offering more menu choices to students and modifying recipes to improve the taste and/or cultural appropriateness of foods.
Because of the challenges mentioned above, it’s understandable why few districts conduct regular, well-designed satisfaction surveys. Instead, many districts rely on informal feedback or one-time initiatives. However, integrating satisfaction measurement into ongoing program improvement efforts can have a positive impact.
Choosing the Right Audiences to Survey
Not all feedback is created equal. While it may be tempting to survey everyone at once, targeted surveys allow you to ask more relevant questions and get more useful data.
Also, prioritize who you need to hear from first, so you don’t overstretch your time and resources.
- Students: Focus on their experience in the lunch line, taste and appearance of food, menu variety, and whether they feel they have a voice in menu choices.
- School Staff: Ask about adult meal options, service quality, and overall perceptions of the nutrition program.
- Parents: Explore how informed they feel about menus and nutritional value, and whether they encourage their children to participate.
- Community Members: Gauge their awareness and perceptions of the school nutrition program. Community members—especially those without children in the school system—are often unaware of the program’s impact, yet they can be influential in shaping local policies and public opinion. Engaging them helps build broader support and understanding.
For each group, keep the survey short (5-10 questions), tailored to their experiences, and easy to complete.
Remember: Not every survey question is applicable to each group. If you ask questions that are irrelevant, respondents may not answer or drop out of the survey altogether. You don’t want to end up with survey data that is incomplete.
Common Concerns and Misconceptions about Customer Satisfaction Surveys
You might be thinking:
- No one will respond. — Response rates can be improved with good timing, clear communication, and incentives.
- We don’t have time. — A simple, well-designed survey takes minimal effort and pays off with actionable insights.
- We already know what they think. — Anecdotal feedback often misses the full picture. Surveys can reveal patterns and outliers you didn’t expect.
- Students will just say they want pizza every day. — Possibly—but with the right questions, you can uncover preferences within your guidelines.
The goal isn’t to cater to every whim but to use feedback to inform better decisions.
Creating a Culture of Listening
Conducting a survey is not just about collecting data—it’s about building a culture of listening and responsiveness. When students and staff feel their opinions matter, engagement goes up.
But that culture doesn’t happen overnight. It requires:
- Consistency: Make surveys a regular part of your operations, not a one-time event.
- Transparency: Share what you learned and what you plan to do with the results.
- Action: Even small changes based on feedback can go a long way.
In the next post, we’ll walk through how to create a survey that gets useful results: what questions to ask, how to format your survey for clarity, and how to avoid common pitfalls that can skew your data.