Fischer Farms and Indiana Farm to School Collaborative Strategies

At Fischer Farms, we are committed to supporting your mission of providing nutritious and delicious meals to students. In light of recent news from the USDA regarding the disruption of Local Food for Schools funding, we are investing our time in learning how we can best serve our customers moving forward into the next school year.

We have dedicated ourselves to understanding your unique needs and challenges. Here’s how we’ve been working to assist you:

• Distribution Navigation: We’ve streamlined our distribution processes to ensure timely and efficient delivery of our products, making it easier for you to receive what you need, when you need it.
• Ordering Assistance: Our team can work with each of you to help you place orders, ensuring a smooth and hassle-free experience.
• Cost-Saving Strategies: We’ve identified various ways to help you save money and cut costs without compromising on quality, from bulk purchasing options to maximizing your menu.
• Culinary On-Site Training: To enhance your culinary skills and menu offerings, we offer free on-site training sessions tailored to your specific needs with our Sales Chef, Jeff Fell.

We are here to support you every step of the way, and we look forward to continuing our partnership to nourish and educate our students as we look at ways to continue farm to school momentum post-LFS funding.

The Fischer Farms Team is here to help you strategize ways you can work with your existing budget to take your farm to school progress into the 2025-2026 school year and beyond.

We offer free resources to help you take the momentum you have worked so hard to build using the Local Food for Schools (LFS) program, to long-term purchases.

• Product Selection: we have seen some real innovation in the last few months from the adaptation of a stove to flat-top cooking surface to variations on "breakfast for lunch". We have over 600 SKU's, we can help you get creative with the cuts and packaging sizes you order to make it fit your budget.
• Timing and Frequency: there is a fine line between having enough and overfilling your walk in's. Keeping an up-to-date inventory, ordering what you need, as you need it, and watching your stock will prevent losing food before you can use it. In the event your distributor has to short your order, a well-maintained stock keeps you from overpaying from a secondary distributor.
• Increasing Participation Rates: across the state, our customers report back to us that their participation rates have increased. They open additional serving lines on Fischer Farms days. Simply put: more students eat on days their food is freshly cooked. More students that eat, more reimbursement.
• A La Carte Offerings: increase revenue through A La Carte and Smart Snack sales. Those are dollars that go into your program and can check many nutrition boxes at the same time. Adding more fresh snack packs, sandwiches that are complete meals, in-house made "lunchables", and less cookies and chips as those Smart Snacks can be sold at a higher price that a tray lunch.
• Reduce Food Waste: when looking for ways to reduce food waste, think about menu management and SKU rationalization. Using similar products and ingredients between schools allows for intra-building transfers when needed and you can utilize similar products in a variety of ways. 

Are you looking for ways to continue your farm to school momentum post-LFS funding? Let's schedule a call to look for ways we can collaborate in the future!