How to use meals day-to-day

This article provides guidance on how to manage daily meals in a school setting based on different meal setup configurations. It outlines three options for handling meal choices: with regular meal choices, without meal choices, and with no attendees. It also explains how to add or edit meal choices through the Lesson Overview and the Daily Summary Page.

The best way of managing meals for students depends on how you've set up meals on your site. For managing staff meals, please see Setting up and managing staff meals

To see which setup your school uses, go to School > Meals > Setup.

• Option 1 - If you have set up meal choices for your students or have set up Rotating Meal Menus (with everything ticked on the Setup page).
• Option 2 - If you don't use meal choices (everything except the last step is ticked).
• Option 3 - If admins (not teachers) input meal choices each day (everything except the last two steps are ticked).

Want to edit your setup to enable easier meals management? Follow the steps here to complete your setup: Setting Up Meals

Option 1 (Students) - Attendees and meal choices

If students have regular meal choices, or parents have chosen the child's meal for them, these choices will populate on this page once attendance is taken. You can add or edit meal choices in two ways.

Managing meals from the Lesson Overview

This option is most useful for teachers - you can see how this works here: Taking the meal register

Using meals from the Meal Daily Summary Page

You can also manage meal choices in the daily summary in the meal section on Arbor. This option is helpful for admin and office staff members.

Go to School > Meals > Daily Summary > View registers. Tick the boxes next to the students and click the Bulk action button to select the meal.

Option 2 (Students) - Attendees and no meal choices

If students are added only as Attendees to the meal but don't have regular meal choices set up, they'll still appear in the meal register. Their meal choice will be blank and needs to be added. You can add or edit meal choices in two ways.

Managing meals from the Lesson Overview

This option is most useful for teachers - you can see how this works here: Taking the meal register

Using meals from the Meal Daily Summary Page

You can also add meal choices in the daily summary in the meal section on Arbor. This option would be helpful for admin and office staff.

Go to School > Meals > Daily Summary and click the Add Students button. 

Enter the student's name to add their meal provision. This option could be used if you will be adding a meal choice for one student. 

Alternatively, you can go to School > Meals > Daily Summary > View register. Tick the boxes next to the students and click the Bulk action button to select the meal.

Option 3 (Students) - No attendees and no meal choices

If you have not added any attendees to the meal set-up, you would not be able to use the Lesson Overview to manage meal choices, as no students will be available to select their meal choices. 

Go to School > Meals > Daily Summary and click the Add Students button. 

Enter the student's name to add their meal provision. This option could be used if you will be adding a meal choice for one student. 

You will not be able to add meals in bulk from School > Meals > Daily Summary > View registers, as the students will not be listed in the meal register. 

FAQs

I have the meal register open, but I can't see a column for meal options to add. What do I do?

In rare instances, you may see a list of students on the meal register, but not see any columns to add meal choices to. This can happen if the column has accidentally been hidden or the table needs reformatting.

If this happens, try these steps:

1. Click the Cog icon above the meal choices table (there are your table settings)
2. Click Reset table settings
3. If there was a formatting issue or any columns were hidden, the table will now show the meal options.

What happens if a student is marked as absent in the lesson register (e.g. for an appointment) before a meal, but physically returns to school before the meal?

In this case, because the student is still marked as absent in the lesson register even after they return, Arbor has no way of knowing that the student is back, and will by default keep their meal choice as Absent. 

To mark the student as taking a meal, you need to manually override this in the meal register by changing the choice from Absent to their preferred choice.

Are staff members able to pick their own meals?

Staff members are unable to pick their own meals. A school administrator must manually add staff meal choices (like option 3 above), or a regular meal choice needs to be recorded on their profile after they have been added as an attendee of a meal (like option 1 above).

Find more on managing staff meals as an admin here: Setting up and managing staff meals