Performing Department
Food Science & Human Nutrition
Non Technical Summary
We will establish much-needed, evidence-based food safety and operational practices to make share tables more feasible and attractive to the nearly 100,000 schools implementing the National School Lunch Program, facilitating systems change to ameliorate child food insecurity and food waste. Share table implementation is currently limited because the existing guidance on share table food safety requirements is fragmented and not specific enough to guide school-level action. Our overall goal is to address the food safety and operational concerns of stakeholders that are hindering share table food recovery. We will conduct qualitative interviews with health inspectors to identify the perceived food safety risks that are informing local health code variation. Next, we will conduct a quantitative microbial risk assessment of foodborne disease risk due to the consumption of share table food items to address stakeholder food safety concerns and identify best food-safety practices. Using these research findings, we will develop and test share table training and implementation resources in schools. Finally, we will provide consistent, evidence-based share table resources across public health, school nutrition, and food pantry sectors through nationally disseminating our research findings and share table resources to key stakeholders while monitoring and evaluating their use. Our project outputs will provide a data-driven plan of action to all key stakeholders that will reduce food waste, increase healthy food donations to non-profits, and create cost savings for school nutrition programs while protecting children's safety and promoting improved nutritional security.
Animal Health Component
0%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
50%
Applied
50%
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
Objective 1. Conduct qualitative interviews with health inspectors to identify the perceived food safety risks that are informing restrictive share table policies.Objective 2. Conduct a Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment (QMRA) of foodborne disease risk due to the consumption of share table food items to address stakeholder food safety concerns and identify best food-safety practices.Objective 3. Develop share table resources in collaboration with key stakeholders and use a train-the-trainer model to pilot them across approximately 60 schools in the FNS Midwest Region.Objective 4. Launch and evaluate a national dissemination of our research findings and share table resources to key stakeholders via social media marketing and online professional development dissemination.
Project Methods
For Objective 1, we will use purposeful sampling to obtain a variation of restrictive and lenient health inspectors by leveraging feedback from the Share Table Advisory Committee and ABCs of School Nutrition Extension staff. A researcher will e-mail potential participants to invite them to participate in the study. We will use purposeful sampling to obtain a variation of restrictive and lenient health inspectors. Consenting participants will participate in an audio-taped 60-minute interview. Interview transcripts will be analyzed for key themes on perceived risks and subsequent mitigation techniques.For Objective 2, we will estimate the actual risk of share table recovery through a Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment (QMRA). Each parameter of the model will be informed by a literature review. We will determine the most likely value of each input parameter to create a point-estimate of risk for a share table practice. Then, to assess the variability and uncertainty in this complex situation, we will use @Risk software to define inputs as distributions and perform a sensitivity analysis to assess which input parameters have the largest impact on risk outputs by performing uncertainty iterations where we fix the value of a single input parameter at the 2.5th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 97.5thpercentile of the distribution. Next, we will track the change in, e.g., the predicted median illness; this analysis determines which input parameter ranges have the largest impact on the magnitude of the outputs.For Objective 3, we will use the QMRA results to develop share table standard operating procedures and corresponding HACCP templates, a training module, and tip sheets for working with local health inspectors and safe food donation to local food pantries. We will use a train-the-trainer program where we will train FNS Midwest Region SNAP-Ed educators to provide training and technical assistance to local schools in share table implementation. SNAP-Ed educators will facilitate a pilot study of the share table toolkit. We will evaluate the pilot study using acceptability, feasibility, and cost-effectiveness metrics.For Objective 4, we will scale-up the implementation of share tables from the FNS Midwest Region to the entire country and evaluate the use of the Share Table Toolkit. We will first finalize the share table toolkit, disseminate it online, and use social media to promote the use of the toolkit. We will quantify the reach of the toolkit using website traffic metrics and download frequency. We will evaluate the impact of the training materials using surveys. We will also disseminate our food safety research findings to local health inspectors and public health departments.