Eliminating Ultra-Processed Food From School Cafeterias Will Be Costly, Complicated, Study Warns

Key TakeawaysEliminating ultra-processed foods from school cafeterias will take money and effortScratch-based cooking requires kitchen equipment that many schools don’t haveMore money also will be needed for healthier food and trained staff.MONDAY, Sept. 28, 2026 (HealthDay News) — It will be far from cheap or easy to eliminate ultra-processed foods from school cafeterias, a new study warns.California’s public schools are required to start phasing out ultra-processed foods starting in July 2029 under a new state law that prohibits cafeterias from serving foods high in sugar, fat, salt and food additives.But it’s going to take more money, staff and equipment for many schools to meet that goal, researchers reported Sept. 27 in the journal Public Health Nutrition.“It’s easy to say, ‘Let’s remove ultra-processed foods from school meals,’ but school districts will likely face many challenges in implementing this policy,” senior researcher Dr. Anisha Patel, a professor of pediatrics at Stanford Medicine, said in a news release.The state statute — called the Real Foods, Healthy Kids Act — requires schools to completely rid their menus of ultra-processed foods considered harmful to children by July 2035.For this study, researchers surveyed a panel of 20 food service directors working at school districts in the San Joaquin Valley about the challenges of meeting the deadline. Schools in this agricultural region serve many low-income families whose kids depend on cafeteria meals.Ultra-processed foods are made mostly from substances extracted from whole foods, like saturated fats, starches and added sugars. They also contain a wide variety of additives to make them more tasty, attractive and shelf-stable, including colors, emulsifiers, flavors and stabilizers.Examples include packaged baked goods, sugary cereals, ready-to-eat or ready-to-heat products, and deli cold cuts.Money will be a major hurdle in meeting the new law’s requirements, the directors said.Ultra-processed foods are cheap and easy to heat and serve, requiring minimal kitchen equipment. Serving whole foods and scratch-cooked meals will increase costs to districts, likely outpacing their food budgets, the directors warned.For example, the director of nutrition services for the Fresno Unified School District ran up against a pickle problem when her team eliminated items containing food dye from menus.It turns out that it costs a bundle to find and buy pickles made without green dye No.5, the director, Amanda Harvey, said in a news release.“They’re pricey for pickles, and it can be quite challenging for our vendor to get them,” Harvey said. “So sometimes we have a shortage of pickles because of this food dye.”The new law might also rule out some strategies that districts now use to reduce their food costs, the directors said.Currently, districts purchase inexpensive commodity foods from the U.S. Department of Agriculture – such as raw chicken – and send it to a food processor in exchange for easier-to-serve items like chicken nuggets, they noted.“While this practice helps schools that don’t have the kitchen infrastructure for anything but ready-to-eat foods, it can inadvertently increase the amount of ultra-processed food on the menu,” lead researcher Andrea Pedroza-Tobias, an assistant professor at the University of California-Irvine, said in a news release.There also will need to be a staffing shake-up at some schools, where the part-time staff hired to heat and serve foods might not be trained to cook healthier meals from scratch, the directors said.Scratch cooking also takes more time, and moving staff from part-time to full-time will require larger budgets for salaries and benefits, they said.In addition, many schools have kitchens designed around heat-and-serve meals, which lack much of the equipment needed for scratch cooking, the directors said.Harvey’s team looked into whether they could make sandwiches from scratch in some elementary schools, but the local health department denied the request because the kitchens didn’t meet permitting standards for scratch cooking.“They said, ‘In order to get these 50 schools permitted, you would need to add new sinks, drains and hoods,’ ” Harvey said. The estimated cost would have run millions of dollars, so Harvey’s team opted to have the sandwiches made at a central kitchen facility equipped for scratch cooking.Some districts have been using grant money to start shifting away from ultra-processed foods, but admit it’s not a viable long-term strategy.Directors said that “if they get this funding for one year, and are not sure they’ll have the same money next year, they don’t feel like they can make sustainable changes,” Pedroza-Tobias said.One of the school districts represented in the study succeeded in shifting most of its food to scratch-made by hiring a chef with a background in nutrition as its food service director, researchers said.“They also did a lot of engagement with families and students to increase the acceptance of scratch-cooked meals,” Pedroza-Tobias said. “For instance, they had a junior chef competition where students submitted a recipe, and they selected some of these recipes to cook in the school kitchen.”Although the new study’s findings seem gloomy, researchers said they hope their work will serve as a road map that will help legislators and educators navigate the challenges of serving healthier school meals.“Moving from ultra-processed food to scratch cooking requires an upfront investment, but healthier school meals can pay off in the long term by preventing health care costs associated with diseases such as obesity, Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease,” Patel said.More informationJohns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has more on ultra-processed foods.SOURCES: Stanford Medicine, news release, Sept. 27, 2026; Public Health Nutrition, Sept. 27, 2026 .What This Means For YouParents should talk to their school district about efforts to cut back on ultra-processed foods..Sign up for our weekly HealthDay newsletter

Eliminating Ultra-Processed Food From School Cafeterias Will Be Costly, Complicated, Study Warns

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