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Tray Trends: Bubble-Gum-Flavored Apples, and Other Sights at the SNA Food Show
Imagine if Las Vegas built a Costco-themed hotel with a particular emphasis on chicken nugget samples and then filled the building with lunch ladies. That’s the best way I can describe the School Nutrition Association’s annual food expo, which is taking place right now in Vegas’ Mandalay Bay Convention Center. Every summer, thousands of lunch ladies flock to the show to sample the newest industry products for school lunch. They stroll through over 800 booths, tasting everything from popcorn chicken and mini cheeseburgers, to whole-grain doughnuts and blue-raspberry slushees. Forget flipping through cookbooks — today, this is the menu planning process for your kid’s school cafeteria.
If you want a bird’s eye view of the problems plaguing school food, this is the place to go. The expo boasted 40 booths showcasing ice cream, cakes, cookies, puddings and other desserts. Over 20 booths peddled poultry (mostly breaded) and 20 more featured beef products. Pizza showed up at 12 booths. Fresh fruits and vegetables showed up at only 10.
I accumulated a thick stack of spec sheets and brochures during my four-hour stroll through the booths this morning. Here’s just a random sampling of the products on display:
- My personal favorite from the show was the Crazy Apple. In an attempt to get kids to eat more fruit, this company has developed apples that taste like bubble gum, cotton candy and tropical blast. Candy-flavored apples????? Next thing you know, they’ll be making bacon-flavored hamburger patties. Oh wait, they already do that…
- No need to serve pancakes and eggs separately anymore. Schools can now buy heat-and-serve “Maple PanEggCakes,” an egg patty nested inside a maple-flavored, whole-grain pancake.
- Cafe Pizza by Papa John’s brings a popular brand name to the lunchroom and “meets National School Lunch Program guidelines.” Sadly, with 900 milligrams of sodium and 33 percent of recommended daily saturated fat, that’s true.
- The brochure for Polish Water Ice boasts that the product has no fat, no dairy, no cholesterol, no peanut oil and fewer than 140 calories. So what does it have? Water, apple juice concentrate, cane sugar, corn syrup, natural and artificial flavor, guar gum, carbohydrate gum, locust bean gum, citric acid and FD&C Red #40. The best part is that one serving counts for half of the fruit and vegetable requirement for school meals.
- If you’re looking for even more sweetened, colored fruit, the United Commodity Group will take your government commodity apples and process them into flavored applesauce. The neon-green “Super Sour Apple” is made of apples, high-fructose corn syrup, artificial flavor, FD&C Yellow #5 and Blue #1, and Vitamin C. And, guess what, it also counts as a serving of fruit!
- Of course, there’s nothing wrong with corn syrup. The Corn Refiner’s Association (one of the show sponsors) made an appearance to pass out pamphlets titled “High Fructose Corn Syrup — Making Healthy Foods Affordable for America’s School Children.” Eliminating the product would “seriously jeopardize and/or eliminate the supply of numerous offerings” in school lunch programs. Like those flavored apple sauces, you mean?
- On the commodity front, Cabo Primo will process your government beef into a beef soft taco that has 43 percent of its calories from fat and 14 percent from saturated fat. The USDA limit for a school meal is 30 and 10, respectively. So how do you serve one of those soft tacos (with “hot, exciting graphics and ovenable packaging”)? As one director on the show floor told me, “I’m looking for foods that are high in calories but low in fat so I can balance out the percent of calories from fat in my processed entrees.”
- If you don’t want fat or calories, try some butter mist from Butter Buds Foodservice. The spray “gives you the natural flavor of butter with zero fat, cholesterol and calories.” And the company’s Cheddar Buds cheese-flavored sauce brings “just-add-water convenience to your foodservice menu.”
- Looking for a way to get a serving of bread onto the lunch tray? Clodhoppers, cocoa-covered graham wafer clusters, count as one USDA serving. It’s “great for breakfast, lunch or after school!”
- Giorgio Foods asks you to “pledge allegiance to breaded American cheese” with its Cheese Sticks, which are, yes, breaded American cheese.
School meals are part of a federal child nutrition program. But make no mistake, they’re an industry like any other.
July 2nd, 2009 at 8:11 am
School meals are so important, and it’s scary to see them being abused by fast food and unhealthy food. Bubble gum flavored apples? Geesh! It’s like the apples McDonalds that are abnormally high in sugar. I think we all need to tell corporations like McDonalds; enough is enough! They need to stop marketing to children. We can all take action through Corporate Accountability International’s Value [the] Meal campaign. Read more at http://valuethemeal.blogspot.com/
July 2nd, 2009 at 9:57 am
I feel sick. I think the only thing that could make me feel sicker right now is if I actually had to eat that stuff. PanEggCakes?? Seriously?
July 2nd, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Sad to say that the SNA is part of the problem, not the solution. I heard the head of SNA speak at the National Farm to Cafeteria Conference in Portland a few months back. Never heard more parent bashing in my life! The SNA is more of a food industry front group than anything else.
July 3rd, 2009 at 11:57 am
I hear you on all the unhealthy food being pushed at kids. But if you’re bashing the bubblegum apple, you obviously didn’t hear the whole story. Crazy Apples are a new product that DOESN’T add sugar or ruin the apple’s natural nutrition. All nutrition being equal, what’s better for kids — a plain apple with one bite out of it in the garbage or a bubblegum flavored apple in their stomach? For kids who don’t like eating fruit, Crazy Apples are a step in the right direction.
July 4th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
But does it really teach the right lessons? Are our kids learning to like apples, or to reject anything that doesn’t taste like bubble gum???
Thanks for shedding some light on this.
July 5th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Good question, M.S. I think the larger lesson depends not on one apple but the variety and nutritional message of the ENTIRE MENU on a kid’s plate. If a school serves ONLY flavored apples, that’s one kind of message. If a school serves a flavored apple once in awhile as a treat, that sends a very different message. I think appropriate VARIETY is the answer to “the right lesson.” And there’s nothing wrong with that variety being fun — as long as fun doesn’t elbow out nutrition.
Does it help kids learn to like apples? I guess we can ask them after Crazy Apples have been out for awhile. I can say that what’s great about eating an apple is the texture and visual as well as the flavor, and Crazy Apples are first and foremost apples. (The bubblegum flavor is actually fairly subtle. The other flavors sampled at SNA, Tropical Blast and Lemon Lime, were stronger.) I think these are less “gateway fruit” into a world of candy consumption and more a lure into the world of fresh, whole fruit.
July 5th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
KIds should eat real food. Crazy Apples don’t count in real food in my book! Apples from an orchard from a nearby or regional farm are the way to go. Bring the farmer in to meet the students. Better for the environment and for the local economy than chemicalized apples from who knows where.
July 6th, 2009 at 7:31 am
The real problem is the USDA & SNA. The USDA allows these companies to sell products that equal a bread, fruit or veggie serving. At face value tha majority of thses products look like what they actually are…junk food…but then the “used car salesman” lets the consumer know that not only is it junk food and the kids will love it but it also equals a 1/4 cup of fruit.
There were companies, 2 in particular, at the show “Selling” complete reimburseable breakfasts, just add milk: Cherry Brownie (1/2 cup fruit, 2 breads); Apple Turnover (1/2 cup fruit, 2 breads); Cherry Turnover (1/2 cup fruit, 2 breads). I can not imagine is my wildest dreams serving these desserts as breakfast.
SNA and the majority of its members allows these companies to push there goods on children and no one stands up and says boo. I walked the show and was horrified that there was very little real food available. The majority of the chicken items were all breaded, the beef is just plain horrible and all the “juices” are basically pop with some even being coffee flavored.
Overall in a time with many farmer’s markets available and a strong push for more real food in schools there was none of this to be found. In fact the major farming corporations (ADM, Con Agra) are now selling school food too. Must be the “cool” thing to do for these companies, and oh yeah, financially beneficial too!
July 6th, 2009 at 8:07 am
I used to think our school meals (UK) were rubbish, but really, it was health food compared to this USA example. evan at its worse turkey twizzler stage!
Uk school meals have improved, in the last three yrs, due in part to the campaign by jamie oliver.
we have seen improvements in the quality of meat, veg, and sweet courses.
a typical weekly menu will include a veg choice and salad every day, homemade pies/lasange/roast dinner , with fruit, yogurt , cake etc.
fries are only allowed once a week.
free fresh fruit every day for those under 8, and subsidised low fat milk. until 8yrs
a recent campaign to improve the teen school meals has resulted in some schools banning vending machines, and replacing fizzy drinks with milk, fruit juice and water.
having read the horror s above, I wonder why any parent would, on a daily basis allow their child to eat the school meals?
putting profit before childrens long term health, MADNESS!
July 6th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
What’s scary is that school lunch is the most complete meal many kids see all day. In communities where over 90% of students receive free or reduced lunch, will kids ever learn what a real, non-flavored fruit or vegetable tastes like?
August 21st, 2009 at 4:02 am
[...] something so warped and inbred it has spawned its own line of hybrid foods. Would you believe apples that taste like bubble gum? Worse than comical, the school lunch program has become a national [...]
August 31st, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Working in the industry I can see all of your sides. I have been working as a chef in a large urban school district for 6 years. We average around 3.5 million lunches a year and budget over 25 million dollars worth of dry food, frozen food and paper goods. When I first stepped into this Job I was all about change, change, change. Like the saying goes,”It is not as easy as it looks.” We have Nutritionist Running, staffing, creating recipes, supervising, ordering…… What does a nutritionist know about kitchen dynamics? What do they know about supervising? What do they know about buisiness? We have a reimberasable program that has lacked in funding since the start of the lunch program. We have laws written in such unsensable ways that no healthy resolution happens (i.e. Sodas were outlawed because the law was written for cabonation not sugar content, so we have FRUIT juices with twice the sugar as a coke) We have a program in place for farm to school yet other laws in my state restrict the amount we can order. We have the Milk, Cheese, Poultry, and bread industries lobbying with so much money that laws are made in their favor. In order to go back to the basics of scratch cooking you have to have time and resources, which believe it or not most school districts do not have. So instead complaining, go and understand these laws and write letters to your states congress men and senators, volunteer at your local school cafeteria to understand what they are serving and how you (as the individual) can make a better change. Talk with the foodservice director to understand their job and the day to day problems they deal with. Try to understand their operation costs, labor, food cost, and non food cost. Then see that most school district are in the red when it is all said and done. Put yourself onto the food service shoes and walk in them a bit, then maybe we can start comparing apples.