FNS Documents & Resources

The Food Buying Guide for child nutrition programs has all of the current information in one manual to help you and your purchasing agent buy the right amount of food and the appropriate type of food for your program(s), and determine the specific contribution each food makes toward the meal pattern requirements.

This is the 2017 Edition of Overcoming the Unpaid Meal Challenge: Proven Strategies from Our Nation’s Schools. This best practice guide is designed to support state agencies and local program operators in their efforts to find workable solutions to the challenge of unpaid meal charges.

This question and answer memorandum is designed to provide an overview of policies related to unpaid meal charges and to address common questions FNS has received from state agencies, school food authorities, and local program operators.

The purpose of this memorandum is to strongly encourage local educational agencies to accept eligibility determinations from a transferring student’s former LEA to minimize disruptions in meal benefits for low-income students and avoid student debt resulting from unpaid meal charges.

There has been confusion about how unpaid meal charges must be handled when all collection efforts have been exhausted. To help address these situations, this memorandum clarifies the processes of designating delinquent debt that has been determined to be uncollectable as bad debt and obtaining assistance to offset bad debt losses.

This is a new collection to review and document state and school food authority National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs Management Information Systems in order to provide FNS with a baseline assessment of the MIS system and to inform FNS regarding how states and SFAs use data systems beyond fulfilling FNS reporting requirements.

This is a request for information from Management Information Systems software and hardware vendors and developers to learn about the functionality of state and school food authority National School Lunch and School Breakfast program data management information systems. 

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published the final rule, Nutrition Labeling of Standard Menu Items in Restaurants and Similar Retail Food Establishments in the Federal Register (79 FR 71155) on Dec. 1, 2014.

This is a request for information from Management Information Systems software and hardware vendors and developers  to learn about the functionality of state and school food authority NSLP and SBP data management information systems.