Maryann Durrant (USBE):
There are three different types of meal service that adult care centers can use on CACFP. Offer versus serve is a specific option that is only available to adult care sponsors and at-risk after school meal programs. You can choose to use whichever style of meal service works best for your organization.
Offer versus serve can help reduce food waste and give participants more choices in their meal because participants are allowed to decline some of the food offered in a reimbursable breakfast, lunch, or supper. Offer vs serve is not available at snack. If you think that you would like to do offer vs. serve at your facility, make sure that you contact the state agency before beginning this type of meal service.
Before we get into the details around offer versus serve, let’s discuss a few terms. A food component is the name of a group of foods in a reimbursable meal. For example, milk is a food component, as are vegetables, fruits, grains, meat/meat alternate. These are the same food components that we discuss when talking about the meal pattern. At breakfast only, vegetables and fruits are one combined component. A food item is a food that is part of a food component. For example, broccoli is a food item in the vegetables food component.
At breakfast, you’ll offer the three required food components, but you’ll need to offer at least 4 different food items. The 4th food item can be from the vegetable or fruit, grains, or MMA component. The child or adult would choose at least 3 different food items, and that would be a reimbursable meal.
Let’s go through an example so you can see what it might look like in practice. Let’s say you’re serving a breakfast that consists of milk, toast, grapes, and boiled eggs. If the participant took at least 3 items, the meal would be reimbursable.
At lunch and supper, you’ll offer at least one food component from all 5 of the required components, the child or adult will need to choose food items from 3 or more food components. For adult participants, milk is optional at supper. If milk is not offered, the adult still needs to select food items from 3 different food components in order for the meal to be reimbursable.
Let’s see an example for lunch. We’ll say that on your menu for the day is milk, chicken, peaches, green salad, and bread. The participant would need to take three components of the five components, and it would be a reimbursable meal.
Use the drop down below to translate the above course content into the language of your preference. You may want to refresh your browser after translating.
Warning: Google Translate is an automatic translation service utilized by USBE Child Nutrition Programs to provide training content that is accessible to our users. USBE is not responsible for the accuracy of the Google translations. This course was created in English and all audio was recorded in English. Utilize the closed captioning for translation of the English audio.