Documenting Substitutions
Maryann Durrant (USBE):
Often times, planning out the meals in advance is one thing, and then the meal itself ends up going differently than expected. Let’s say that you were planning on serving apples, but the day before you were planning on serving them, you looked at the box of apples that you purchased and half of them had gone bad. Now you don’t have enough apples on hand to serve to all of the children. You do have some back up canned peaches that you can serve. You’re planning on serving the apples that you do still have and peaches to everyone else. This is just fine, but you’ll need to record this on your menu record. It can be very simple. Let’s say that you were able to give apples to all of the 6-12 year olds, but all of the 1-5 year olds got canned peaches.
You could simply write in “canned peaches” under apples. The serving size is the same, so you wouldn’t need to change the serving sizes. Next you would need to document who got which fruit. You could simply write (6-12) by the canned peaches and (1-5) next to the apples. This would be an acceptable way to document the substitution. If you’re substituting an entire component, you would simply cross it off and write in the new component. You would update the serving sizes if it’s different for the substituted component.
It’s important to document substitutions. Something that we’ve seen on reviews is that centers don’t document substitutions and then when we compare the menu records to the receipts, it comes out looking like they didn’t purchase a sufficient quantity of food. Chances are they did purchase enough, they just didn’t accurately document what they served.
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