School Food Service held meetings with Heartland School Solutions at the beginning of the year to discuss the next phase of implementing WebSmartt Back of the House. The next module for consideration was Menu Planning and Food Production. Several members from the Nutrition Services Team and the Tech Team visited Orange County, Florida as they had already implemented this module. After this visit, we held a meeting to discuss their findings only to learn that the module was not as advanced as the processes that we already had in place. Therefore, at midyear, it was decided not to pursue installation of this module. A few months had passed and members of the Nutrition Services team had received several requests from managers to modify the Food Production Record and as a result of the requests they asked us to reconsider the module installation.

We had a representative from Heartland School Solutions come to Palm Beach County to train several staff members on the Nutrition, Menu Planning and Production module of WebSmartt. Discussions continued on the complexity of entering data to develop recipes compared to existing software and the amount of labor required to do so; therefore, it was decided again not to move forward with this module.

As a result, our strategy for next year will be to develop a more robust Production Record and Ordering Process to streamline the ordering process for the cafeteria managers and Field Specialists. Also a recipe database will be developed to possibly replace Nutrikids in the future.