Citizen, Scholar, Steward

Learning about our lunchroom: what's new this year?

At KCD, we are committed to offering a variety of delicious, healthy, quality foods through our daily lunch program. This is important to us. According to our part-time dietitian Catherine Arnold, research shows that the quality of diet can have a significant impact on a student’s academic performance, mental clarity, and psychological and physical development. For many years, we have been fortunate to have an in-house kitchen staff who has offered us delicious foods, provided great variety in daily lunch offerings, and demonstrated tremendous dedication to our students and employees.

We have made a few changes to our lunch program this year that put an increased emphasis on eating a balanced diet, ensuring that those with food allergies and other dietary restrictions have suitable options, and providing more useful information about our lunch program. As you can see from looking at the menus for the next few weeks, most of our lunch offerings haven’t changed.

  • Most entrees remain the same from last year, and many student favorites appear in the monthly rotation, such as Taco Day, Breakfast Day, pizza, and the KCD Wrap.
  • Portion sizes remain consistent with what we have provided in past years.
  • We continue to offer two soups daily, as well as a sandwich bar and a salad bar.
  • We still offer skim, 2%, and low-fat chocolate milk.
  • We continue to use whole wheat bread at the sandwich bar and in peanut butter sandwiches; this bread is exactly the same product that we have offered for many years, so students won’t see any change. The same is true for our pasta, which has been a whole wheat pasta for a number of years.

Here are the changes we’ve made this year:

  • Online lunch menus now list all the sandwich and salad bar items in addition to the entrees and side dishes, allowing students to preview the full range of meal options in advance and allowing parents to help plan meal choices with their children if they choose to do so.
  • Daily lunch menus now clearly indicate food allergen and category information for those with allergies or dietary restrictions.
  • There is now a daily offering of house-made hummus on the sandwich bar as well as a specialty salad in the Bearcat Cafe. These items have been very well received.
  • Lower school students now have a dedicated salad and sandwich bar that is appropriate for their height and available only to them.
  • We have adopted a white whole wheat bagel, which will be joined at least a couple of days per week by the blueberry bagels that have been served in the past.
  • Although we no longer offer orange juice, we have added fruit-infused waters to our beverage selections, which have been a big hit so far!
  • We have increased our fresh fruit offerings to include a variety of whole fruits and cut fruits.
  • Dessert is offered three days per week, with yogurt parfaits offered the remaining two days.
  • In an effort to streamline food preparation for our staff, the Bearcat Cafe will typically offer only one entree instead of two as we often did in the past.

Some of the changes that we have implemented have been received very positively so far. We have also received some feedback that has already prompted us to alter a few of the product choices that we had implemented for the year. In the coming weeks, we will switch back to the Boar’s Head cold cut products that we adopted last year, and we are bringing back the style of breadsticks served last year because students have voiced a strong preference for them.

We have already been listening to student feedback about our lunch offerings, and there will be an opportunity for you to share your own feedback through a survey that we will be sending out in a few weeks. As the year progresses, we will continue to review our plans and make adjustments as needed. In the meantime, you are also welcome to contact Ms. Arnold at catherine.arnold@kcd.org. She would be happy to answer your questions and offer additional information. Ms. Arnold will have an information table at each of the upcoming Parent Night events, so stop by to meet her and learn more! She will also present some information at a parent-director meeting for each division during the fall. Look for more information about those meetings in upcoming emails.

We have had a great start to the school year, especially now that the rain of the first couple of days of school is behind us and the students can take advantage of outdoor play time on our beautiful campus. I look forward to seeing many of you at upcoming athletic games and other school events. Go Bearcats!
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4100 Springdale Road • Louisville, KY 40241 • (502) 423-0440 • Fax (502) 423-0445
Kentucky Country Day School is a private JK–12, coeducational school located on a spacious 80+ acre campus in Louisville, KY. KCD combines a rigorous academic program with a wide variety of athletic and extracurricular programs. Our outstanding faculty creates an intimate learning environment that is both challenging and supportive.