Digitizing the pencil-and-paper process of school menu planning

Before any food gets on a child’s cafeteria tray, menu planners have to navigate a tangled web of bureaucracies—government regulations, food distributor logistics and pricing, as well as school district procurement procedures. Many school food service directors are still using pencil, paper, and binders (lots of binders) as their main tools in doing their work and any mistake can create millions of dollars in compliance costs.  It’s easy to imagine how these folks can become frustrated by such an intimidating and time-consuming process. When we first got together with Coylar Technology Services and Gold Star Foods, we all agreed that the situation needed to change.

A platform built in partnership with the United States Department of Agriculture.

We conceived and built Cartewheel, a menu planning app that takes all the complexity of today’s process and simplifies it, allowing  planners to focus on food that kids enjoy, that tastes great, and is sourced from the best suppliers while ensuring constant compliance with NSLP nutrition standards.

We partnered closely with the USDA throughout our development cycles. As a result of our collaboration, they removed redundant specifications and added notices regarding modern accessibility standards. In a big win for the app, we were able to get our auto-suggest calculation features approved by the USDA—an optimization that had previously been blocked.