School foodservice pros give MAHA plan a bad grade

 

 

CHICAGO, October 29, 2025 — Bertrand Weber, winner of the 2020 Silver Plate in the Elementary and Secondary Schools category, didn’t come to his profession in the usual way.

 

He was running five-star resort hotels when his son, then age 6, was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. “I spent a year-and-a-half in the [school] cafeteria with him, helping him decide what he can and can’t eat,” recalls Weber. “I started looking at the state of our food system,” a sobering exercise that changed his life.

 

“I made a pledge to myself to bring real food back to kids,” says Weber, now Director of Nutrition & Wellness Service for Minneapolis Public Schools. “That's what led me to schools.”

 

So when the federal government issued its Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy, a cornerstone of the Trump Administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiative, Weber grabbed up the 20-page report with high hopes.

“My first reaction was, ‘Duh! Tell me something we haven’t known for a long time,’” he said of the report’s insistence that immediate and significant action is needed to bolster children’s health. “But you’re not providing real solutions.”

 

“We were relieved that it was not more restrictive,” with prohibitions on serving foods that kids love but give nutritionists pause, Weber continues. “But it’s a lot of fluff.”

He’s not the only school foodservice professional to express disappointment. Fears of the government being too strident and impractical in its efforts to bolster childhood health have given way to an old industry question: Where’s the beef?

 

Danielle Bock, Director of Nutrition Services for Greeley-Evans School District 6 in Colorado, notes that school foodservice is addressed only once within the 120 recommendations for making children healthier. The lone provision expressly directed at schools is switching to whole milk from the fat-free version universally served in lunchrooms today.

 

Roughly as much attention is given in the report to improving what’s served in healthcare facilities, prisons, the military, and facilities for military veterans.

 

As far as school foodservice goes, “It’s Milquetoast, pure Milquetoast,” says Danielle Bock, Director of Nutrition Services for Greeley-Evans School District 6 in Colorado, invoking the name of the famously wimpy fictional character Casper Milquetoast. “I thought it would be an opportunity for Americans to wake up and realize what we needed to do. But there’s nothing there.”

 

Who’s in charge?

 

For one thing, the report focuses on what the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) can do to promote childhood health. School lunches fall within the purview of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which gets relatively little attention in the report. “The USDA is our agency,” says Bock.

 

For another, the blueprint for action skips over what seem like obvious opportunities for making the nation’s food supply more wholesome and healthful, like halting the use of pesticides that can linger in foods.

Bock and Weber say they wonder how much input food manufacturers had on the strategy and how that compares with the influence of the operator community.

 

Bock notes that a cereal popular in the United States may be sold in a nutritionally preferable form in Canada or overseas markets because those nations have stricter ingredient and dietary regulations. U.S. regulators could have duplicated those standards but instead were swayed by processors’ arguments that the changes would be too expensive and impractical, she and other foodservice execs contend.

 

If MAHA proponents were serious about boosting the availability of lightly processed or made-from-scratch options in lunchrooms, they could have taken a different route, according to the school feeders. They note that the sector has been striving for years to offer fresher, more wholesome fare, but has been thwarted by outmoded kitchens, a shortage of staff talent, and, more than anything, meager budgets. Addressing those challenges could significantly impact food quality.

 

In any case, there was little opportunity to provide that and other input to MAHA’s strategists, according to many in the school foodservice community.

“That’s what’s frustrating," says Weber. “We keep looking at this as an opportunity. [But] the locomotive is not driven by the right person.”

 

As far as Bock knew, fresh input was largely limited to a visit by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and USDA Secretary Brooke Robbins to the cafeterias of schools in Alexandria, Va.

 

The school district’s foodservice operations didn’t respond to a request for more information about what was discussed during the visit.

 

“We work with CSPI from a research perspective,” said Weber, referring to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a public advocacy group that has pushed hard to improve American’s nutrition. “They even said they’ve reached out [to MAHA].” Half the time they got no response, and the answer was apparently “no” when they did hear back, he recounted.

 

It’s a misconception that the MAHA strategy was drafted without significant input from the school foodservice community, according to a spokesperson from the School Nutrition Association, the sector’s main advocate in Washington, D.C.

“SNA definitely reached out to the MAHA Commission,” the movement’s coordinators, the spokesperson said in an interview. “Our CEO, Patty Montague, was able to meet with MAHA officials. There was an effort to educate them that school foodservice is a model for promoting childhood health.”

 

Indeed, she said, the association was galvanized by a preliminary MAHA report that looked in depth at what the initiative has identified as the root causes of obesity and other ailments common among the young. That study did not favorably compare the national school lunch program to the programs other countries have developed to promote better nutrition among their school-aged citizens.

The MAHA strategy report came out a few months later.

 

“We were quite happy that the strategy report incorporated a lot of the information we had provided,” the SNA spokesperson continued. “The initial report did not credit schools with success. We were quite relieved to see that schools were not identified as part of the problem” in the strategy report.

 

What’s next?

 

The next step in the MAHA’s effort to promote children’s health will be putting flesh on the outline provided in the strategy report. “We anticipate continuing those conversations on childhood nutrition,” the SNA spokesperson said.

In addition, the association and foodservice directors like Weber and Bock are awaiting two other key communications from the federal government.

 

One is a proposed definition of “ultra-processed foods,” or UPFs, the refined preparations that aim to spare the at-home or professional cook from complicated time-eating preparation. An ability to define UPFs would become the first step toward regulating them for health reasons.

 

The other is the update of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, or DGA, the dining principles recommended by the government to promote the public’s health.

 

The shortcomings of the MAHA strategy report “changes my expectations that both of these will be based on scientific facts,” says Weber.

 

“I’m worried. I’m genuinely worried,” says Bock.

 

No nationwide definition of UPFs yet exists, though California recently published one of its own. Certain dishes meeting the state criteria will be banned from school foodservices as of July 1, 2035.

 

“We want to be sure the federal definition takes into account all the work school foodservice has done to provide wholesome foods despite its limits in terms of equipment, labor, and budget,” says the SNA spokesperson. “We also want to make sure it’s science-based and takes into account factors like nutrient density and inclusion.”

 

Practicality is a concern for Bock. She fears that yogurt and hummus, two staples of her kitchens, could fit any definition of UPFs that is hammered out by the federal government. “Hummus is my go-to way for getting more protein on the plate,” she explains. Inhibiting its availability could put a strain on her operations, Bock says.

 

Until the changes sought through the MAHA movement are clear and digested, it will be business as usual for school foodservice.

 

For the SNA, that means continuing its push for more funding from government for the National School Lunch Program, an initiative that provides free or reduced-price lunches and breakfasts to grade-school students in need.

 

Bock intends to continue nudging her operations to do more scratch cooking, regardless of what help MAHA may or may not provide. “My long-term goal is to start making breakfast items from scratch,” she says.

 

“We have to really think about back-to-basics from a food perspective,” or getting back to real food, comments Weber.

 

“Not everyone is on the same page,” he continues. But "we will continue to do what we fully believe is best for our students." 

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