Study Design and Protocol to Assess Fruit and Vegetable Waste at School Lunches

Abstract

This paper has two main aims: (1) to describe the design, implementation, and testing of a protocol to assess longitudinal changes in F&V plate waste conducted as part of a quasi-experimental study, (2) to provide baseline descriptive data on school demographics and study participants. This paper describes the protocol development and implementation, and presents baseline data of a longitudinal fruit and vegetable (F&V) plate waste study. The protocol was developed to determine the preliminary impact of Brighter Bites, a 16-week school-based nutrition intervention, on F&V wasted and nutrients wasted from school lunches. We measured plate waste using a quasi-experimental design (n = 2 intervention schools receiving Brighter Bites, n=1 comparison school; n = 115 4th and 5th grade children). We measured plate waste for five days at each of four time points over the 2017–2018 academic year (baseline prior to intervention, three additional time points). Data collectors measured lunch F&V waste using digital scales and recorded weights on a data collection app. This study was conducted in three central Texas public elementary schools serving predominantly low-income families (>89% of children on free/reduced lunch program). On average, at baseline, 59.1% of all F&V were wasted and children tried <1 F&V at meals. Foods most wasted were legumes and foods least wasted were par-fried baked potatoes. Final retention rate across the four time points was 75.70%. Measurement inter-rater reliability was 100% (r = 0.99). Our study presents a protocol for detailed, individual-level, longitudinal plate waste assessment in elementary schools.

Food Waste in Schools: A Pre-/Post-test Study Design Examining the Impact of a Food Service Training Intervention to Reduce Food Waste

“…The researchers felt the data were more generalizable by assessing food waste at multiple time points both before and after the intervention [ 39 ]. National school lunch programs are designed to meet students’ nutritional needs over one week; therefore, food waste for one full week is a common timeframe in school food waste studies [ 14 , 15 , 17 , 35 , 40 ]. However, due to limited resources, this study only assessed food waste twice during both the pre- and pos t -test periods.…”

“…These prior studies using the SLM strategies in their multifactorial interventions have led to an increase in children’s consumption of fruits, vegetables, and low-sugar milk varieties [ 17 , 20 , 22 , 24 , 26 , 27 , 28 ]; however, findings have not been consistent across studies [ 26 , 29 , 30 , 31 ]. Additionally, very few school-based intervention studies have measured food waste of the entire meal (i.e., with every meal component: fruit, vegetable, milk, grain, and protein) [ 18 , 27 , 28 ] with a large and diverse number of students [ 14 , 17 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ].…”

Systematic literature review of food waste in educational institutions: setting the research agenda

“…Key methods : The methods used for assessing food waste include direct observation (Marshall et al , 2019), field notes (Yui and Biltekoff, 2020), cross-sectional questionnaire (Abe and Akamatsu, 2015), semi-structured interviews (Zhao et al , 2019), non-structured interviews (Falasconi et al , 2015), structured interviews (Burton et al , 2016), focus group discussion (Blondin et al , 2015), experiments (Kim and Morawski, 2013) including randomized controlled experiments (Katare et al , 2019), quasi-experiments (Visschers et al , 2020), longitudinal studies (Lagorio et al , 2018; Marshall et al , 2019) and pre- and post-test-based intervention studies (Kowalewska and Kołłajtis-Dołowy, 2018; Kropp et al , 2018; Lorenz-Walther et al , 2019; Visschers et al ,2020). Figure 7 presents a snapshot of the methods.…”