Avon Lake Schools Launches Interactive Lunch Menu for Students with Allergies

AVON LAKE, OH - The Avon Lake City School announced this week that they were making their school lunch menus more accessible to students and families by launching an interactive online menu.

The system allows users to calculate calorie intake and review nutrition information, as well as to sort menu items according to allergens. There is a “filter by allergens” icon on the website where parents can click on the allergy their child has and the lunch menu automatically strikes out those items that are unsafe for the student.

Parents can also take the curser and hover over a menu item on the screen and the nutrition facts for the item will appear, including calorie count, and the other nutritional facts the public is now accustomed to seeing on food labels. It also lists the allergens.

You can find the menu here.

Reactions to food are one of the deadliest allergic reactions each year. People visit the emergency room about 200,000 times each year because of food allergies. Almost 10,000 people stay in the hospital each year because of food allergies, says the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.

With researchers estimating that up to 15 million Americans have food allergies, this potentially deadly disease affects 1 in every 13 children (under 18 years of age) in the U.S., that’s roughly two in every classroom, according to Food Allergy Research & Education, Inc., it is important for anyone serving food to provide ingredient information.

The economic cost of children’s food allergies is nearly $25 billion per year.

Image from Avon Lake Schools