NY Times
COMMACK, N.Y. — The new vending machine sat unnoticed as students rushed past its baby carrots, yogurt smoothies and hummus to neighbors dispensing Snapple, Doritos, Goldfish and Cheez-It. The lunch period was nearly over before a potential customer stopped to check out its offerings.
No sale.
“This is way too healthy for a snack,” said John Achnitz, 15, a 10th grader. “Kids want healthy stuff like baked Doritos, but not an apple that they can get at home free.”
Like many schools across the nation, Commack High School on Long Island is stepping up its war on junk food this year. Its new cafeteria vending machine — a lighted panel on the front shows sliced apples and oranges against a backdrop of lettuce — is part of a pilot program intended to encourage students who skip lunch or stay late for sports to make better choices.
“By fostering healthy snack vending options, we support the lessons that are taught in the classroom and at home,” said Donald A. James, the superintendent of schools.
But so far, potato chips are winning.
Commack’s healthy machine sold 296 items totaling $388.75 from Sept. 1 to Sept. 19, less than one-third of the sales made by a nearby machine that offers less nutritious fare. Moreover, the top-selling item from the new machine was baked potato chips — less fat than fried chips, but less than ideal — with almost no takers for peach smoothies, roasted edamame or fresh pineapple chunks.
Around the country, schools that have banned candy and soda and trimmed trans fats from their lunch menus are now restocking their vending machines with whole-grain, reduced-fat snacks or fresh fruits and vegetables. These efforts have been fueled by renewed concerns about childhood obesity, as well as growing state and federal legislation regulating the content of food and beverages sold in school.
Fourteen New York City high schools are testing vending machines that offer fresh mango, watermelon and pineapple chunks or raw carrots and celery.
Last month, Jon Corto of the Buffalo Bills recruited four of his teammates to promote six healthy vending machines in the district in Orchard Park, a Buffalo suburb, where he attended school. “I’ve always been health-conscious,” he said. “You eat Doritos and it’s not going to help your performance.”
Philadelphia schools, which were among the first to embrace healthful vending, with five machines selling organic tea, flavored water and Clif bars in 2009, will soon expand to 21 machines. And in Florence, Ariz., high school administrators have seen a spillover effect from two healthful vending machines installed last year, with lower-calorie options like Popchips and Pirate’s Booty being added to other machines.
These efforts have drawn praise from many parents and nutrition experts, who say putting healthier food in front of children makes them more likely to eat it. And they have helped prompt a niche industry: one company designed a machine with a digital LCD screen streaming video messages like, “Hey, looking for a sustained energy snack to get you through practice? Try this,” alongside a picture of a Kashi granola bar and its nutrition facts.
“Having these healthy snacks is a far cry better than what the schools were selling before,” said Kelly D. Brownell, a Yale psychology professor and director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity.
Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, also praised healthful vending machines. “Dietary change happens over time,” she said. “I worked 10 years to get schools to go from candy bars to granola bars and baked chips. But when you look at the whole mix, it really does help to reduce calories, saturated fats and sugar.”
While 27 states have adopted policies regulating nutritional content in elementary schools’ vending machines — typically limiting fat, sugar, calories and portion size — some of those policies have lacked teeth, said Elizabeth Walker, a project director for the National Association of State Boards of Education. Under a 2010 law, however, the federal Agriculture Department must set national nutrition standards for school vending machine foods and drinks by the end of next year.
Of the nation’s nearly 5.4 million vending machines, 6.8 percent were in elementary, middle and high schools in 2010, up from 5 percent the year before, according to a survey by Automatic Merchandiser Magazine. Another 5.9 percent were at colleges.
Jackie Clark, a spokeswoman for the National Automatic Merchandising Association, which represents the vending industry, said it had embraced healthier options in recent years with the Fit-Pick program, in which orange stickers can be affixed to trays holding one of 400 products meeting the industry’s nutritional guidelines.
Revolution Foods, a company that creates healthy-meal programs for schools, is expanding its operations to vending machines in response to requests from principals; its first 10 machines were to go into Denver area schools in October, with dozens more coming to Colorado and Northern California in the next six months, Kirsten Tobey, a founder of the company, said.
Fresh Healthy Vending, whose chief executive likes to describe its machine as a “miniversion of Whole Foods,” introduced 800 of them to schools and colleges in the past year and adds 150 new machines a month. Another company, Vend Natural, has installed 400 school machines since 2007, most recently in Montclair, N.J.
Sean Kelly, chief executive officer of Human Healthy Vending, which designed the machine with the digital message screen, said that promotions like digital messages, free samples and contests helped to increase monthly sales to an average of about $1,500 per machine, up from $1,000 last year. “You cannot just take a standard vending machine, throw graphics on it, put some healthier options in there and expect everything to work out perfectly,” he said.
In Commack, some students complained that items in the new machine were either unappealing or expensive: hummus is $3; yogurt smoothies, $2; and a pair of hard-boiled eggs, $1.50, compared with the more typical $1 for a bag of chips. John, the 10th grader who walked away, said he mistakenly bought a grape-raspberry twist for $1 last week — he was aiming for the baked barbecue chips — and “it just tasted really bad.”
But 10 minutes later, the new vending machine finally had a customer. Zach Auster-Mehr, a junior, dropped in $1.25 for the baby carrots with ranch dressing. “It’s a good idea,” he said. “I usually buy potato chips.”
Marissa Gibaldi, 17, a senior, said she had become a regular on days when she did not bring lunch from home. “My mom will ask, ‘What did you have for a snack?’ ” she said. “And I can actually tell her, instead of saying, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ ”
