Putting together a school meal isn’t easy.

“It is a puzzle essentially,” said Lori Nelson of the Chef Ann Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes scratch cooking in schools.

“When you think about the guidelines, there’s so many different pieces that you have to meet. You have to meet calorie minimums and maximums for the day and for the week. You have to meet vegetable subgroup categories.”

Districts that receive federal funding for school meals — through, for example, the National School Lunch Program — must follow rules set by the Department of Agriculture (USDA).

And those rules may be changing soon.

In early January, the Department of Health and Human Services and the USDA unveiled new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, along with a new food pyramid.

The USDA sets school nutrition standards based on those dietary guidelines, which now place an emphasis on protein and encourage Americans to consume full-fat dairy products and limit highly processed foods.

Here’s what to know about how the new food pyramid could impact schools:

Cutting back on ready-to-eat school meals won’t be easy

Highly processed and ready-to-eat foods often contain added sugars and salt. Think mac and cheese, pizza, french fries and individually packaged peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

These foods are also a big part of many school meals, said Nelson. That’s because schools often lack adequate kitchen infrastructure to prepare meals from scratch.

“Many schools were built 40-plus years ago, and they were built to reheat food. So they weren’t built as commercial cooking kitchens,” said Nelson.

Even so, schools have been able to bring sodium and sugar levels down in recent years.

“They’ve been working with food companies to find a middle ground, to find recipes that meet [the current] standards and appeal to students and that schools can serve given the equipment that they have,” said Diane Pratt-Heavner, a spokesperson for the School Nutrition Association.

Bringing sugar and salt levels down further would likely require that food companies adapt their recipes and that schools prepare more meals from scratch, Pratt-Heavner said.

But leaning into scratch cooking won’t be easy. A recent survey of school nutrition directors by the School Nutrition Association found that most programs would need better equipment and infrastructure as well as more trained staff — and nearly all respondents said they would also need more money. “You cannot go from serving heavily processed, heat-and-serve items to scratch cooking immediately,” said Nelson. “It is a transition.”

Protein-rich school meals will come at a higher cost

At the top of the new food pyramid are animal products such as meat and cheese. The new guidelines prioritize consuming protein as a part of every meal and incorporating healthy fats.

“That could cause a change in school breakfast standards,” said Pratt-Heavner. “Right now, there’s no mandate that breakfasts include a protein.”

A typical school breakfast today might include fruit, milk and a cereal cup or muffin; some schools may serve breakfast burritos or sandwiches.

She said schools would “absolutely need more funding,” should they be required to provide protein under the USDA’s School Breakfast Program.

Current standards allow for schools to serve either grains or meats/meat alternates for breakfast, and Pratt-Heavner said, “Protein options … are more expensive than grain options.”

She said it’s unclear whether the USDA would require protein under its own category or whether the agency would consider milk to be sufficient to meet any new protein requirements.

Whole milk is getting a lot of attention

Schools that participate in federal school meal programs are required to offer milk with every meal, though students don’t have to take it. Up until recently, an Obama-era rule allowed for only low-fat and nonfat milk in schools.

But the new food pyramid emphasizes whole fat dairy, like whole milk. At the same time, recent federal legislation reversed that Obama-era rule and now allows schools to serve reduced-fat and full-fat milk.

One more thing to know about milk: Federal law also limits saturated fats in school meals — and whole milk has more of those than low-fat and nonfat varieties. But the recent federal legislation now exempts milk fat from those limits.

What does all this mean for schools? They’re now able to start serving whole milk, and they won’t have to worry about whole milk pushing them past the limits on saturated fats.

It’ll be a while before these changes trickle down to schools

While the USDA sets regulations for schools based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, it takes time to draft and implement new rules after new guidelines are released.

“The current school nutrition standards that we’re operating under were proposed in February 2023, finalized in April 2024,” said Pratt-Heavner. “The first menu changes in school cafeterias were not required until July 2025.” Other changes are still rolling out.

Which is to say: The new dietary guidelines won’t bring immediate changes to school cafeterias. They’re only the first step in a regulatory process that will take time.

“We’re going to have to see what USDA proposes,” said Pratt-Heavner.

Then, she said, “the public will comment on those regulations, and then final rules will be drafted and issued.”

The USDA then gives schools and school food companies time to update recipes and implement the new nutrition standards.

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