Development of a School Salad Bar Evaluation

Around 17% of American children are obese. A contributing factor to obesity is low consumption of fruits and vegetables. Children will likely not meet fruit and vegetable consumption recommendations when access is limited and quality is poor.

The school environment is an important setting where children's dietary choices can be evaluated. Providing changes to the school food environment may increase consumption of fruits and vegetables.

As part of the “Let's Move Salad Bars to School” initiative, schools in Orleans Parish received salad bar structures. Salad bars have had little success in New Orleans; thus, research is needed to identify factors that impact their use.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the use of salad bars in New Orleans schools to identify factors that contribute to sustained use.

Multiple surveys were developed for school administrators, food service director and workers, and students regarding factors that affect use of the salad bar.

A cafeteria observation and school food environmental audit were also created.

This research will provide the data to make recommendations to school administrators and food service staff. Next steps in this research include data collection and analysis to determine factors that make the salad bars sustainable.

Challenges in development of the study included schools that were on record as receiving salad bars but claimed that they did not, as well as schools that received salad bars but made no attempt to put them in use. Communicating with and recruiting schools was also challenging.