Brett Foster, MBA, SNS, Executive Director of School Nutrition at Knox County Schools, joined us to host a session at ANC 2026 about running a school nutrition department like a business. Here’s the story behind how her team harnesses every dollar to feed more kids and make a lasting impact on their future.
Imagine a version of your school nutrition program where the money you’re already owed doesn’t slip through the cracks of a spreadsheet or a spelling mismatch. What if every cafeteria manager understood their numbers well enough to fix a problem before it comes up in audit prep? Picture walking into a board meeting to ask for a price increase with real data behind you instead of a guess.
Those aren’t hypothetical scenarios for one Tennessee school district. Through a handful of specific, repeatable habits across eligibility, budgeting, and pricing, Knox County Schools found one million dollars in their nutrition program. With those million dollars going to a $4.70 meal across 180 serving days and 90 school sites, the result is about 12 more students covered per site, per day.
Brett Foster is the Executive Director of School Nutrition for Knox County Schools, the third-largest district in Tennessee, with more than 58,000 students. Here’s how she led her team to turn that imagined version of the program into their reality.
Start with the data you’re already missing
The first place they looked was the direct certification process the district already had to see if students were quietly falling through the cracks. Spoiler: They were.
“One of the things that I tell myself, and we implement in our service, is to be a student of the data and understand that data integrity is really important,” Foster said.
Name misspellings, hyphenated last names, and mismatched addresses between assistance-program files and student records were costing the district eligible matches every month.
Foster’s team built a monthly workflow with the district’s Impact & Analytics team:
- Run the eligibility file
- Compare it against everything in the background of the student information system, including old addresses, and maiden names
- Review every likely match monthly
Applying eligibility matching helped the team capture hidden enrollment in their nutrition program.
“When I tell you the time that it takes to do that, it is very, very significant,” Foster said. “However, I said from the very get-go, it is well worth the time that I spent on that, because we were able to match a huge number of students that we would not have been able to otherwise.”
Her team also caught a detail that was costing the district money even on students who were already being served. In Tennessee, district-level funding for economically disadvantaged students is tied to SNAP eligibility, not Medicaid. A student who qualified for both, but was recorded as Medicaid-eligible, still got fed, but the district missed out on over $1,800 per student in funding tied to SNAP. Applying the eligibility hierarchy took priority and was a meaningful piece of the first chunk of claimed funding.
Treat every cafeteria like its own business
Foster’s team produces a monthly profit-and-loss statement for each one of their 90 sites, treating each cafeteria manager as though they’re running their own small business.
“I truly do believe that people can’t improve if they don’t know where the issues are,” Foster said.
Rather than simply telling managers to cut costs, her team compares similar schools side by side and drills into specific line items: food cost, labor cost, paper and supply spending, so managers can see exactly where the losses are coming from. That comparison creates curiosity and ownership. Without the data, cost-cutting feels arbitrary. With the data, managers can make strategic decisions.
For example, after years of pandemic-era habits like a lid on every tray and food served in disposable boats, the team walked managers through what that packaging cost, multiplied across every meal, every day, districtwide. Then they considered if any of these practices still served the kids.
“That all adds to the cost of what it is to produce this meal,” Foster said.
Timing mattered here, too. A districtwide salary study raised wages significantly, which was the right call for staff, but it also meant labor costs no longer had room to absorb rising food and paper costs the way they once did.
“We weren’t saving anything on labor anymore because we were actually paying people what they should be paid,” Foster said. “That was a little eye-opening.”
It’s a big part of why the paper-cost and portion-control work became a priority rather than a nice-to-have.
Make the case, then make the increase
Knox County hadn’t raised meal prices in several years, and Foster knew an increase would mean a conversation with the board and calls from parents. Instead of guessing, her team modeled several pricing scenarios, including the participation dip they expected to see.
“I will say that for us, the drop was not as much as I thought it would be,” Foster said. She also credited transparency with families: “They were very understanding, because they knew when they were going to the grocery store that it was getting more costly to feed their own family.”
Two tools helped them make the case. The first was a Paid Lunch Equity comparison, which showed the district was receiving more funding for a free meal than for the identical paid meal it was serving. The second was a true-cost-of-a-meal breakdown, the same thinking behind the School Nutrition Association’s well-known $4.70 figure, which accounts for uniforms, travel stipends for bank runs, equipment repair, and small wares, not just food and labor.
Foster’s advice to other directors weighing the same decision: don’t raise prices just enough to get through one year. Many school nutrition directors avoid bigger pricing conversations by doing small increases every year. That spreads out the political friction, but it also means the program is always chasing rising costs instead of getting ahead of them, and families see annual increases as the new normal. A bigger increase after years of data analysis and transparency comes off as justifiable with visible cost changes, instead of routine adjustment.
“It may be a significant increase at one time, but if you do that, then maybe you won’t have to do it for a couple more years,” she said.
The real math
None of this was a one-time fix. It was a set of habits: a matching process that runs every weekend, a P&L that gets reviewed every month, and a pricing model built on real numbers instead of guesswork. Individually, each habit closed a gap. Together, they added up to real, sustained funding for this district.
Now imagine what your own program might be sitting on. Your school nutrition software should provide the tools to help you find every dollar and close the funding gaps.
Take action with an audit-readiness check-in
Here’s a great place to start: Use our audit-readiness scorecard to see where your nutrition program stands on oversight and visibility. It reveals where to look first in tightening oversight and making sure every dollar is doing all it can for the kids in your district.