What Does 6 Cents Buy?

Six cents. When the California Department of Education (DoE) and California Food Policy Advocates (CFPA) started working together to help childcare providers offer kids healthier foods, they supported a six cent increase in the state reimbursement rate for each meal, to enable providers to buy more fruits and vegetables, offer healthier cereal and make other changes. But in a state with a $50 billion budget deficit, even that couldn’t make it through a price-conscious legislature.

Kumar Chandran and Phyllis Bramson-Paul

The good news is, the DoE and CFPA have found ways to help get healthier foods to children anyway. Working together, and with other public agencies and private advocacy groups, they developed a plan to strengthen the Child and Adult Care Food Program in the state.

“One thing we realized,” said Phyllis Bramson-Paul, director of Nutrition Services at the California DoE, “was that we needed to provide consistent messaging related to nutrition and physical activity across programs.” Once they recognized this need, several programs, including the state Women, Infants, and Children program, the 5-a-Day program and childcare programs, started working together to develop consistent standards and regulations.

After starting this conversation, they realized that, for little or no cost, childcare programs could switch the milk they serve from full-fat to low-fat or skim. They could improve the nutritional quality of the cereals they provide to kids. And, instead of offering two fruits as a snack, they could provide one fruit and one vegetable.

Kumar Chandran, nutrition policy advocate with CFPA, noted a few specific lessons they learned when trying to get these updated standards passed, as part of the Child Care Nutrition Bill. “The biggest obstacle we faced was the fiscal environment. There were no policy reasons for not improving these nutrition standards.”

“Being able to point to the support of other key stakeholder groups was extremely important when we introduced this language.”

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