School Food Service Costs: Does Location Matter?
Abstract
Over 30 million lunches and 9.8 million breakfasts are served every day to children in participating American schools through the USDA National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs. It is challenging for participating local school food authorities (SFAs) to serve appealing, healthful meals while covering food, labor, and other operating costs with USDA reimbursements. But it may be more difficult for some SFAs than others due to cost differences across locations. Analysis of data from a large national sample reveals that after controlling for differences in SFA characteristics, sharp differences in costs remained among rural, urban, and suburban SFAs and across regions. The highest costs occurred in Mid-Atlantic, suburban SFAs and the lowest cost existed in southwest, urban SFAs. Differences in food costs explained the largest share of this variation.Download Info
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.Bibliographic Info
Paper provided by Agricultural and Applied Economics Association in its series 2010 Annual Meeting, July 25-27, 2010, Denver, Colorado with number 60690.Length:
Date of creation: 2010
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:ags:aaea10:60690
Contact details of provider:
Postal: 555 East Wells Street, Suite 1100, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53202
Phone: (414) 918-3190
Fax: (414) 276-3349
Email:
Web page: http://www.aaea.org
More information through EDIRC
Related research
Keywords: school meal costs; cost function; SFA; Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety;References
No references listed on IDEASYou can help add them by filling out this form.
Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Ollinger, Michael & Ralston, Katherine L. & Guthrie, Joanne F., 2011. "School Breakfast and Lunch Costs: Are There Economies of Scale?," 2011 Annual Meeting, July 24-26, 2011, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 103191, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
- Newman, Constance, 2012. "The Food Costs of Healthier School Lunches," Agricultural and Resource Economics Review, Northeastern Agricultural and Resource Economics Association, vol. 41(1), April.
Lists
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.Statistics
Access and download statisticsCorrections
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:aaea10:60690For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (AgEcon Search).
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

