Schools move toward cashless system
BY PAM BRANNON Gulf Breeze News news@gulfbreezenews.com

School lunches will have at least a couple new items in some of the schools this Fall. And the Food Service contractor who handles Santa Rosa County School lunches, Sodexho, is trying to move toward a cashless school lunch line as fast as possible.

Sodexho reported to the school board last week that for the next school year the traditional milk cartons in the secondary schools - high school and middle schools - will be replaced by half pint plastic bottles. The goal, Sodexho says, is to encourage more milk drinking.

This year, also, the ice cream will have a new look. Every year ice cream vendors bid on the school district's contract, and this year for the first time Blue Bell won the bid. School Board members said that was a good thing.

In most areas, sales at the school lunch lines were up last year. For breakfast, Sodexho served 963,786 meals with all the schools combined for the entire school year. The lunch numbers were just slightly down, serving just over 2 million meals, but the ala carte numbers increased last year. Ala carte was at 1,652,636 items sold in the 29 schools within the district.

Sodexho is trying to move toward a cashless lunch line, the report said, with encouraging the MealPay Plus program. Parents can either go online or use the phone to pay ahead into the student's account and the student does not have to carry money to school for lunch or breakfast items. Last school year Sodexho reported 5,318 students' parents participating in that program, with over $1- million in transactions. This year they are doing a push to try to get most parents to use the system.

Sodexho reported they now have 220 employees serving the Santa Rosa school meal programs. Last school year they brought in just over $9,700,000 in revenues and had expenses of $9,300,000.