How’s this for a recipe for disaster: a high school has open campus for all of its 1800 students, the cafeteria is located in an out-of-the-way section of the building, and the school is surrounded by more than a dozen fast food restaurants and other commercial food outlets.  The Child Nutrition Program at Bozeman High in Bozeman, Montana faces these obstacles, and was only doing $600 business a day – until we undertook a market research project that helped turn the program’s fortunes around.  Without solid market research, any child nutrition program is flying blind, and this session will describe the process we followed at Bozeman and help other districts model similar projects to address their own business challenges.

Session Objectives:

Participants will understand the crucial importance of good market research for the success of their programs.

Participants will achieve a basic understanding of the elements of a well-designed market research project, should they wish to do such a project themselves.

Participants will see a real market research project in action, and see how we “connect the dots” between what we learn from the research and devising an action plan to address our challenges.