SNA hosted a record number of industry members at the 2013 Annual Patron Meeting, held near their headquarters in National Harbor, MD. Our Director of Product & Business Development, Gabe Aiello, was in attendance. The presenters and large district director participants provided extremely important information and feedback to members regarding industry trends and projections. Gabe was able some time during the “mega issue” discussion with some of our technology company competitors and compare notes in an atmosphere where all of us were united, if only temporarily, by our common purpose and passion to serve the school nutrition community.

We all share the challenges of assisting our customers with software that meets new regulations while trying to be responsive to new feature requests at the same time. In particular we found that differing state agency requirements, on top of the USDA requirements, put an added burden on food, equipment, and technology systems providers alike. We hope you can be patient with us, as we are all in the same boat, fighting the same headwinds.

The new meal pattern challenges, including student acceptability of menu changes, maintaining participation, developing menus to meet the requirements and managing food costs are top on industry participants’ to-do lists, for developing solutions for their customers. To that end PCS is providing new software and hardware to assist with fast growing breakfast programs, as well as new features for accurate processing of direct certification and community eligibility. Our TrakNOW software has all of the approvals necessary to assist with meeting the new requirements and reporting needed for audits.

The big challenge we would like to work with you, our customers, on is managing increases in food cost. If we put our heads together we can come up with new and better ways to more accurately forecast counts and menu mix, project product usages for bids, and provide cost modeling that will help bring food cost percentage in on target. Please don’t hesitate to share your individual challenges with us, so that we can incorporate your needs and requirements into our product development.