Around 11:40 on a crisp spring day in early April, students began arriving at the Haleyville High School cafeteria in Alabama.
Cheerleaders, football and baseball players, and other members of the student body lined up in the lunch line and sat at their tables. They chatted and laughed about upcoming games (go, Roaring Lions!) and prom while eating plates of chicken Alfredo, green beans, and salad.
Emma Anne Hallman, standing in the corner, watched the teenagers carefully. As director of child nutrition for the Haleyville City School District, she is tasked with feeding 1,600 students, kindergarten through 12th grade.
For months, Hallman and other school lunch program directors have worried about new federal regulations that would reduce allowable sodium levels and introduce new sugar restrictions for foods served in school cafeterias. A debate has broken out in which many parents and nutritionists applaud efforts to make lunches more nutritious, while some school lunch administrators fear the results will be less palatable to students, reducing consumption and increasing waste.
“We are embarrassed as this could result in changes to our menus,” Hallman said. “We would need to look at sodium amounts in recipes for some of our students’ favorite foods, like chicken wings, hot wings, or even some of the Asian foods.”
The task of feeding the country’s schoolchildren has never been easy, but in recent years it has become particularly difficult. Rapid inflation has made it difficult for schools to prepare meals at a cost of $4.30 per student or less, the federal reimbursement level for the approximately 30 million students who receive federally subsidized meals. Meanwhile, competition for labor has resulted in higher wages, putting pressure on lunch program budgets, and employee shortages in some cafeterias.
“I can’t compete with what Amazon pays,” said Betti Wiggins, director of nutrition services for the Houston Independent School District, one of the largest school districts in the country, which serves more than 200,000 meals a day at 276 locations. Comparing her program to a quick-service restaurant with annual revenue of $132 million, Wiggins said about 35 percent of her budget went to labor costs and half to food.
“I have to pay for all of that on a budget of $4.30 per student, and some food manufacturers are backing out, saying they can’t produce food at that cost anymore,” he said.
While they are far from perfect (cafeterias serve a lot of processed foods), school lunches are arguably much healthier than they were a few years ago, thanks to an exclusive program aimed at combating childhood obesity and championed by Michelle Obama when she was first lady. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, passed in 2010, required schools to reduce calories, fat and sodium in foods served in cafeterias and increase the offering of whole grains, fruits, vegetables and skim milk.
However, the new regulations drew harsh criticism and the Trump administration revoked some of them, such as the 1 percent ban on chocolate milk. But last year, the Biden administration proposed updates that would gradually limit salt and sugar in school lunches in a bid to meet federal dietary standards.
On Wednesday, the Agriculture Department made the new rules final after reducing several provisions of the previous proposal and changing the start dates. Instead of gradually reducing sodium in lunch foods by one-third of current levels by fall 2029, school cafeterias will have to reduce sodium levels by 15 percent by the 2027-28 academic year. And for the first time, schools will be required to limit the amount of added sugars in cereals and yogurts starting in the 2025-26 academic year.
Standing in a Haleyville School District pantry a few weeks ago, Ms. Hallman nodded toward boxes containing cups of Cocoa Puffs cereal and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. They contain less sugar than the cereals you buy at grocery stores and pour into bowls at home. Still, she said many of these foods would likely be affected by the new rules and the manufacturer would have to modify them. The label on a Cocoa Puffs cereal bar, for example, showed it had eight grams of added sugar, while a frozen strawberry Pop-Tart had 14 grams.
“Breakfast, especially grab-and-go options, is going to be tough,” Hallman said. “The changes could affect the number of times per week we can offer certain sugary items to students.”
Many nutritionists and health policy watchdog groups say the new rules on sodium and sugar are important since so many children struggle to have or make nutritional choices outside of school.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group, applauded the move to reduce the amount of sugar in foods served in schools, but called the smaller reduction in sodium levels a “missed opportunity, given that nine out of 10 children consume too much sodium.”
“Nutrition standards, in general, are very contentious right now,” Meghan Maroney, director of the group’s federal child nutrition programs, said in a previous interview. “But we have to do what science says is best for children’s health.
“I know schools and others are working on very tight margins, and sometimes it’s hard, thankless work, but schools and manufacturers need to figure out how to make this happen.”
Shortly after the Biden administration proposed new limits on sodium and sugar early last year, big food companies began to intervene.
General Mills, which makes Cocoa Puffs and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, said in public comment on the proposed rules that the new sugar limits should apply to a student’s weekly diet at school, rather than to individual items. He also requested that the possible start of the limits be delayed to give manufacturers time to reformulate products.
Another manufacturer, Ocean Spray, asked that sugars added to dried cranberries in the manufacturing of its products not be counted as part of any sugar limitations. Dairy Farmers of America urged regulators to continue allowing flavored milk and make whole milk an option again in schools. The group also argued that sodium in cheese should not be counted in overall sodium limits.
Executives at Tyson Foods, which supplies chicken, pork and beef products to schools, said the new sodium limits, depending on where they are set, could limit the number of days per week that some popular products, such as Chicken with Buffalo sauce, could be offered.
And while Tyson works with suppliers and experiments with ingredients to find alternative spice blends that can replicate the taste of salt, sodium plays a critical role beyond making food tasty.
“From a food safety perspective, sodium reduces water in chicken and extends shelf life by delaying spoilage,” said Alisha Deakins, associate director of product development at Tyson.
Salt is also inexpensive compared to other spice options.
“We want to make sure food is safe and profitable for school districts,” Ms. Deakins said. “There are options that are alternatives to salt, but they have a potentially higher cost.”