The Smarter Lunchrooms Movement is a nationwide movement based on proven strategies for nudging students to select and eat the healthiest foods in the school lunchroom. The Smarter Lunchrooms Movement provides schools with the knowledge, motivation, and resources needed to build a lunchroom environment that makes healthy food choices the easy choice.

The Smarter Lunchrooms Movement uses a scorecard to provide schools with a snapshot of how many strategies are currently in place in a lunchroom. The Smarter Lunchrooms Scorecard contains 60 simple, no-cost or low-cost strategies that lunchrooms can use to increase participation, improve consumption of healthy food, and reduce food waste. The scorecard is used to gather pre- and post- data about the cafeteria environment.

The Smarter Lunchrooms Movement applies research-based principles that lead children to make healthy choices when provided with the full spectrum of choice. The Movement brings evidence from the fields of economics, marketing, and psychology into the school cafeteria.

The Smarter Lunchrooms Movement is:

• Easy and inexpensive to implement
• Grows school meals participation
• Increases student satisfaction
• Uses simple evidence-based strategies to gently nudge students to make healthy choices
• Empowers, energizes, and engages school nutrition staff
• Increases the amount of healthy food students eat
• Reduces waste

Resources for support related to Smarter Lunchrooms can be found directly through the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement website at https://www.smarterlunchrooms.org/.

The guide was developed through two of our Community Health Improvement Plan workgroups. In coordination with local hospitals, community stakeholders, and partner organizations, more than 30 diverse Macomb County community organizations identified four priority areas and subsequent workgroups for a Community Health Improvement Plan based on the results of the assessment. 

The Macomb County Health Department wants to support your school in helping students stay healthy through eating healthy foods and being physically active. Simple strategies to keep students healthy can help your school meet education goals. Improved student health results in decreased rates of absenteeism, fewer behavioral problems, and increased school-wide test scores and grades. We've developed a guide to help your school health improvement implement programs, like Fuel Up to Play 60. This guide will be shared with schools in Macomb County.