Maryann Durrant (USBE): Once you have the proper documentation for a CN label product, you still need to determine how much of the product to serve to meet the meal pattern requirements for the different age groups. We’ll go through some examples together to give you an idea of how this can be done. If you’re not the individual portioning out the serving sizes for the children, please make sure to pass this information on to your staff member who is in charge of portioning them out. When they know the reasoning behind how much to serve to each child, it will reduce the chance of an insufficient amount being served.
In this example, you can see that 5 chicken nuggets would provide 2 oz equivalent meat/meat alternate and 1 oz equivalent grains.
Now lets look at the serving size requirements. There are two components in this product, so we’ll look at the meat/meat alternate serving sizes and the grains serving sizes. Let’s start with the 6-12 age group for lunch/supper. This group would require 2 oz of M/MA and 1 slice of grain or bread. How many chicken nuggets would you need to serve to meet this requirement? You would need to serve five. That would meet both the meat and grain requirement. Now let’s skip to the 1-2 year old group. You can see that this age group needs 1 oz of MMA and ½ slice of bread. This is half of the 6-12 age group requirement, so you could simply half the serving size of the 6-12 age group. Rather than serving 2.5 chicken nuggets, you could serve 3.
Next we’ll go to the 3-5 year old group to determine how much to serve them. You can see that they would need 1.5 oz of MMA and the equivalent of ½ slice of bread. There are a few different ways that you could calculate the serving size for the 3-5 yr age group. One way is to determine how many ounces of MMA would be in each chicken nugget. You know that there are 2 oz of MMA in 5 chicken nuggets, so divide 2 by 5. That equals 0.4. So you know that each chicken nugget has 0.4 oz MMA. Now let’s determine how many would need to be served to equal 1.5 oz of MMA.
Divide 1.5 by 0.4 to get this answer. You come up with 3.75. You would round up and serve 4 chicken nuggets to meet the MMA requirement. Remember, there are two components that we’re looking at though. Would 4 chicken nuggets meet the grains serving size? We had determined that it would when figuring out the amount needed for the 1-2 year olds. You can serve more than the minimum portion size, just not less. So to sum up, for the 1-2 year olds, you would serve 3 chicken nuggets, for the 3-5 year olds you would serve 4, and for the 6-12 year olds you would serve 5.
In this example, one corn dog provides 2 oz equivalent MMA and 2 servings bread.
Once again, we’re looking at the MMA and grain components. We’ll start with the 6-12 year old age category again. You can see that one corn dog would provide both the meat and bread serving sizes for the 6-12 year olds. The 1-2 year olds need half the amount of the 6-12 year olds, so you could give them half a corn dog. Since a hot dog is a choking hazard for this age group, you would be cutting it up before serving, so it wouldn’t be too hard to only give a half to the 1-2 year olds. The 3-5 year olds are always the tricky ones. They need 1.5 oz of MMA and ½ slice of bread. 1.5 oz is ¾ of 2 oz, so you could give ¾ of a corn dog and the MMA and bread component would be met. You could also give a whole corn dog. Again, you can give more than the minimum amount, but not less. Hopefully these two examples have helped you see the general process to determining how much of a CN labeled product to serve. If you have a product where you’re not sure how much to serve, please call your specialist and we can help you determine that information.
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