One of the biggest changes will occur at breakfast. No longer will cafeterias offer both a hot and cold breakfast option most mornings. Instead, hot items will be limited to twice a week, and on some mornings, students will receive just a bowl of Cocoa Puffs — a new menu item billed as “vegetarian” — and two pieces of fruit.

The changes, scheduled to begin next month, affect more than 40 schools with on-site kitchens that typically have served up a wide variety of menu items for breakfast and lunch.

A plan by Boston public schools to cut cafeteria costs by reducing the variety and number of offerings is raising concerns among some parents and food service employees, who worry that students will not find anything they like to eat.


At lunch, students will be limited to two or three options, and entree dishes will be rarely served. Instead, most cafeterias will offer peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches every day, along with such popular fare as macaroni and cheese, chicken nuggets, hamburgers, meatball subs, and grilled cheese and cold-cut sandwiches.

The switch has alarmed a number of parents and child nutrition experts, some of whom voiced their objections during a school budget hearing last week.

“I’m so disappointed to hear that decreasing the nutritional value of school lunch by limiting choices and variety to ultimately offering more chicken nuggets, hamburgers, pizza, and hot dogs is under consideration,” Stephanie Shapiro Berkson, an Eliot K-8 School parent and a professor of public health who specializes in childhood obesity, said during testimony.

School officials emphasized in interviews Friday that all the menu items meet federal school-nutrition guidelines. That goes for both of the new cereal items — Cocoa Puffs and Trix — which they said contain less sugar than the varieties sold in grocery stores.

Menu choices, they said, reflect popular demand and streamlining the choices is part of a concerted effort to reduce the amount of food thrown out and to increase participation in the breakfast and lunch programs. The officials also said the changes bring schools with full kitchens in line with approximately 80 other schools where meals are shipped in, and therefore already have limited choices.


“If you have fewer choices, you gain more efficiencies in ordering,” said Naveen Reddy, the school system’s director of business improvement.

But during testimony at the budget hearing, school food service directors in Cambridge and Watertown who live in Boston disputed the notion that fewer food choices would reduce waste.

Melissa Honeywood, the director in Cambridge, said Cambridge Rindge and Latin School has one of the lowest food costs in that city, even though it has by far the largest array of food choices, including a pasta station, two deli counters, two salad bars, two soup stations, a grill, a vegetarian station, and other options.

“Overproduction creates food waste, not the number of options,” Honeywood said.

Boston is pursuing the cost-cutting measures as it contends with an operating deficit in its food service program. During the past eight years, the program has lost more than $20 million.

This year, the program was initially on track to lose another $4 million, but the School Department cut losses to $2.3 million by enacting a hiring freeze and other measures, and is hoping the deficit will shrink more by June.


Much of the shortfall is due to food costs, school officials said. About 60 percent of its budget is devoted to the cost of food, while the industry standard for school food service programs is between 40 percent to 45 percent.

Part of the problem is the cost of shipping meals to the schools without kitchens. Those meals come from an outside contractor and arrive frozen. Cafeteria workers heat them up in ovens, and students eat them either in classrooms or in an all-purpose room.

Another factor has been the School Department’s failure to use free commodities — including fresh fruit — from the federal government. School officials plan to take advantage of that option now that they have established a new system for receiving those items at a warehouse and setting up the transportation to distribute them to schools.

The school system also has experienced difficulty in gauging which meal choices students might select, creating waste.

A scathing independent review last year of Boston’s food service program found wide dysfunction, a “hostile work environment” for employees, and a lack of basic financial protocols.

Some food service employees have expressed skepticism about the menu change and predicted that some students would not eat at all while others might simply go with peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches most of the time. Those employees asked not to be identified out of fear of reprisal.

“Unfortunately, the kids will suffer because of the program’s mismanagement,” one of the employees said.

James Vaznis can be reached at jvaznis@globe.com.