The Meal Planner module helps childcare centers plan nutritious meals, organize menus, manage food items, and maintain compliance with meal program requirements. With reusable templates, a centralized food library, allergen tracking, and built-in reporting, Meal Planner makes it easy to create consistent meal plans while reducing manual effort.

Using Meal Planner, you can:

Go to:

Activities → Meal Planner

From here, you can create meal plans, manage templates, maintain your food library, and generate reports.

Recommended Screenshot: Meal Planner Dashboard

Create meal plans for individual days or an entire date range.

While creating a meal plan, you can add meals such as:

Select food items directly from your Food Library to build each meal.

After saving, the meal plan can be edited at any time.

Meal plans can be updated whenever your menu changes.

You can:

Copying an existing plan is useful when creating recurring weekly or monthly menus.

Meal Templates allow you to reuse frequently used meal plans instead of creating them from scratch.

To create a template:

Once created, templates can be applied whenever you create a new meal plan.

When creating a new meal plan:

Templates help maintain consistency across classrooms while significantly reducing planning time.

The Food Library stores all food items used across your meal plans.

Instead of creating food items every time, add them once and reuse them whenever needed.

For each food item, you can configure:

The system also suggests existing food items while typing to help prevent duplicate entries.

Meal Planner allows you to define serving sizes for different age groups.

This helps ensure that meal plans follow your center's nutritional requirements while maintaining consistency across classrooms.

Serving sizes are automatically available whenever the food item is added to a meal plan.

Each food item can include allergen information.

Common allergens include:

Allergen information is displayed whenever the food item is included in a meal plan, helping staff quickly identify foods that may require special attention for children with dietary restrictions.

Meal plans can be exported as PDF files for printing or sharing with staff.

To export:

Printed meal plans can be displayed in classrooms or used as part of your daily meal preparation process.

Meal Planner includes built-in reports to support meal program compliance.

Available reports include:

Provides an overview of meals served during the selected reporting period.

Displays detailed meal information, including:

These reports help simplify documentation and support subsidy or compliance requirements.