The Green Apple Initiative is SLA’s year round promise to make school foodservice not only nutritious but also sustainable. This commitment focuses on reducing waste, conserving resources, and empowering students, parents, and schools to make eco friendly choices every day.
Replacing Styrofoam with biodegradable trays and designing production processes to minimize waste.
Using Green Seal™ certified cleaning products that protect both students and the environment.
Partnering with Nutrislice® to deliver digital menus and communications, reducing paper use while keeping families informed.
Partnering with farms to source fresh, local produce whenever possible.
Our goal is to reduce our footprint while inspiring the next generation to value sustainability in everyday life. Each step we take today helps build a brighter, more sustainable future for the students of tomorrow.
Our animal welfare initiatives include:
We are committed to switching all of our shell and liquid eggs to cage-free by the end of the 2027 school year. In 2025, we switched all shell eggs to cage free. We continue to work with our suppliers, who were greatly impacted by egg shortages in the last year, to identify opportunities to transition liquid eggs and eggs used as ingredients to cage-free.
We are beginning to work with our producers and the Humane Society of the U.S. to address the welfare problems associated with the fast growth of broiler poultry. We remain committed to our promise to be 100% compliant with the Better Chicken Commitment.
We targeted to move our pork supply to group sow housing without the use of gestation crates by the 2027 school year. As a first step, in 2025, we converted 40% of our pork procurement to reduced crated systems known as "group housing." We are continuing to work with our suppliers to identify appropriate producers who source pork from operations that don’t confine pigs in gestation crates as we continue to work towards this goal. Our updated target has us working towards reduced crating systems for our full pork supply by the end of the 2026 school year.
As aligned with the American Veal Association’s 2007 resolution on animal welfare, we have eliminated veal produced in veal crates from our supply chain.
We are working to address the issues of pain relief and potentially eliminating product produced where de-horning, tail docking and or castration are practiced. The dairy industry’s own trade association and medical association agree that tail docking should be eliminated and has set a timeline for producers. De-horning is a procedure that common sense and science show should be done with pain relief, and the use of breeds without horns could eliminate the issue entirely. Lastly, science shows that castration should be done with pain relief.
SLA considers itself a leader in K-12 Child Nutrition serving charter and private schools. While a number of food service providers have supported meat reduction efforts, SLA recognizes that we are the leader in improving environmental sustainability and student health. SLA will continue to serve meat, eggs, and dairy, and these products will be part of our nation’s diet now and into the future. At the same time, SLA will set ourselves apart by making, serving and educating about plant-based meals, an integral part of our core beliefs and values. Inclusivity is an important consideration when developing the core menu plans at SLA. Over the last few years, SLA is proud of the progress made to highlight plant forward options. As student preferences evolve, so do our goals. This year, SLA has set a goal to expand these efforts by developing menus where one third of meals offered will be plant-based by the end of 2027. SLA will increase the meals offered each year by 10%, beginning the fall of 2025, based on product availability, regulatory changes and pricing compatibility. In an effort to increase our plant-based menu offerings, SLA will partner with Humane Society of the United States to pilot plant-based meals and marketing. In addition, we actively seek out collaboration with innovative companies and culinary leaders that are aligned with our goals to provide increasingly higher percentages of plant-based options to our students. Finally, our strategic partnerships with plant-based food vendors will provide additional plant-based menu items with Non-GMO protein sources. We are very proud of the partnership we have with our students and act upon the guidance they provide to formulate our menus.
SLA understands that there are some policy initiatives underway that attempt to criminalize food companies for labeling plant-based foods using terms typically applied to animal proteins like veggie burger, almond milk, Beyond Meat, Impossible Burger and other common descriptors. These measures could also impact the emerging “clean meat” sector. SLA opposes, on principle, these types of label censorship regulations. We believe in a free and open marketplace and that fair competition is what makes the market work. These types of policies do not serve consumers and should not become law.
Together, our Green Apple Initiative and Animal Welfare Commitment demonstrate SLA’s dedication to sustainability, ethical sourcing, and community well-being.
