Meals and food items

Meals & Nutrition has two tabs: Meal Types and Food Items. Both are configuration — the list of meals staff choose from when they log what a child ate.

Meal Types

Add Meal asks for a Name such as Breakfast, Lunch or Afternoon Snack, an optional Description, a Sort Order and a Disabled tick.

Sort order controls the order staff see on their phones, so number them through the day. The names you set here are exactly what appears in the staff app’s meal picker — a missing meal type is why staff cannot log a meal.

Food Items

Add Food Item catalogues a food:

• Name — for example Chicken Nuggets, Apple Slices
• Description — preparation notes
• CACFP Component — Milk, Meat / Meat Alternate, Grains, Fruit or Vegetable
• Whole Grain Rich — for CACFP reporting
• Allergens — Milk, Eggs, Fish, Shellfish, Tree Nuts, Peanuts, Wheat, Soybeans, Sesame

Allergen tags here describe the food, and are for your own reference when planning. They are not checked against any child’s allergies. Nothing in the app warns staff that a food on the menu conflicts with a child in the room, so keep doing that check yourself — a child’s own allergies are on their record’s Medical tab, and in the staff app.

Deleting a food item removes it from all meals.

What this screen does not do

There is no menu builder, no weekly meal plan and no way to attach food items to a meal type in the web app today. The two tabs are lists; recording that a child ate something happens against the child, on their Daily Report tab, or from the staff app.

If you need a printed menu or CACFP claim from this data, export what you need and build it outside Childcarious for now.