PLUS School Menus

Approximately 73 million primary school children in 60 low-income countries go to school hungry every day. While those children may already be receiving at least one school meal, it may not always be one that meets their specific nutritional need.

The increasing obesity epidemic and rapidly changing global diets makes the need to influence dietary quality through school feeding even more urgent. Innovative solutions are needed to support the scale up of School Feeding programmes and ensure that all vulnerable children have access to nutritious, cost-efficient, school meals.

With PLUS, decision makers have now a user-friendly online tool which supports the design of nutritious, locally sourced and cost-efficient school meals.

PLUS uses a set of databases (food prices and food composition tables) and, through an advanced mathematical algorithm, calculates a "menu" of meals, ensuring  nutritional requirements using locally-sourced food and seasonal ingredients.

The software underwent a thorough Human-Centered Design (HCD) approach to create its interface. This process enables an extremely user-friendly flow so that anyone, with little or no training, can create school feeding menus in a matter of minutes.

Healthy and well-nourished school children learn better. Ensuring that girls and boys stay in school and are healthy and ready to learn allows them to fully achieve their potential as adults. Very simply: sick or undernourished children cannot attend school and hungry children cannot learn. 

School Feeding programmes can help get children into school and help them stay there. They provide children with safe and nutritious food, encouraging dietary diversity and healthy eating habits. When purchased locally from smallholder farmers ("Home Grown School Feeding"), programmes maximize benefits for students and local communities, by integrating smallholder farmers into food supply chains and generating profit for local economies.

PLUS is being piloted in several WFP country offices since mid-2019. Initial results from Bhutan show that PLUS can help make substantial savings. Thanks to the calculations being done through the algorithm instead of the traditional manual elaboration, PLUS obtained a menu 31% less costly than the one currently being implemented, while maintaining the nutritional value and increasing the amount of locally sourced food. Those potential savings could be used to increase the number of children in the programme, substantially improve the nutritional value of meals or boost investments in local agricultural production. 

While two additional selected countries undergo piloting of the tool, staff from more than 25 Country Offices and all 6 Regional Bureaux have requested to be part of the piloting and implementation of PLUS.

In 2020, the PLUS software will go through a thorough enhancement. Partnerships with key development actors will be strengthened and several countries will begin field implementation in a continuous feedback and improvement process. From 2021 onwards, global expansion will start in close collaboration with Governments and partners.

The potential of PLUS is already recognized within the humanitarian and development community: the project received a WFP Innovation Challenge award in 2018 and was selected for the Global Best Practices Award at the World Expo Dubai 2020 in the category “Water, Food and Energy Security". That being said, further investment, partnerships, and expertise are always welcome.