Reseda : Breakfast Program Wins Prize for School

Like any good restaurateur, Reseda Elementary School’s cafeteria manager Jeannette Painter knows that a customer can become loyal through those subtle excesses that make an ordinary meal an experience.

Care for some fresh strawberries with your cereal? Or perhaps a sheet of troll stickers attached, as a gift, to the bottom of your tray?

Going that extra distance to attract more customers to her kitchen, Painter and her staff have been providing such treats to the school’s students during breakfast for the past two months.

Their efforts have earned the school first place in a Los Angeles Unified School District contest to persuade more elementary school students to eat their first meal of the day at school. The contest, designed to emphasize the importance of breakfast to young students, included a $1,500 prize to be used for supplies or school-related activities.

During the contest period, Painter and her staff raised the number of regular morning customers from 92 to 207 students a day by reducing the 60-cent price of breakfast to 25 cents and dispensing toy surprises with random meals.

“We tried to give them new eating experiences,” Painter said. “We offered things like breakfast egg rolls, pizza bagels and different kinds of coffee cakes. Kids fall in a rut too easily. You have to make eating exciting for them.”

In addition to the expanded menu, Painter and her staff spiced up Reseda Elementary’s cafeteria experience by including, with some meals, stickers decorated with troll faces or book markers inscribed with such phrases as “What’s happening?”

“They were really excited about the prizes,” Painter said. “That’s what they were originally looking for.”

Though now that the contest is over those prizes (and the reduced price) will no longer be a part of the cafeteria environment, Painter said she will continue trying to keep students interested in eating breakfast on campus by keeping the menu diverse.