School-meal Team Acts Fast to Provide Grab-and-Go Meals for School Put on COVID ‘Pause’

When a surge in COVID cases caused a three-day pause in in-person classes at Netzaberg Elementary School in Germany, Department of Defense Education Activity officials asked the Exchange whether it could offer carry-out lunches.

The Exchange’s school-meal program offered grab-and-go meals at Netzaberg Elementary School when the school paused in-person learning from Jan. 11 to 13. Nearly 350 meals were served on Jan. 11.

The question came on short notice: The decision to close the schools from Jan. 11 to 13 was made on Jan. 10. But the Exchange, which operates the school meal program for children overseas, was well-prepared to shift to grab-and-go lunches.

“When COVID started in 2020, we had to modify our menus slightly to allow for grab-and-gos,” said Adrian Hinson, senior restaurant program planner. “When schools closed, there was still a need to provide meals to the families.”

Families picked up the carry-out meals during school lunch hours. Social distancing was enforced as the families lined up for their meals. All five components required by the USDA—meat/meat alternative, grain, fruit, vegetable and milk—were included. On Tuesday, 107 breakfast meals and 240 lunch meals were served.

“Since COVID, we’ve always created menus that were flexible enough to be made to-go,” Hinson said. “Even stuff like spaghetti. You might think, ‘How do you do that?’ You just package it in a salad bowl. We just used what we had to offer it, to be able to package it and just bag it. We had to get bags that we don’t carry in schools, so we would just use T-shirt bags from the main stores.”

The school is scheduled to reopen to in-person learning on Jan. 18. Because Friday is a teacher-training day and Monday is the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, students were already scheduled to be off on those days, so the “pause” was limited to three days.