LIVERPOOL — It’s a lunch-lady cliché, but for school food service directors around the country, mystery meat might really be on the menu. Thanks to ongoing issues with the supply chain and workforce, schools are scrambling to plan breakfast and lunch menus for K-12 students.

Annette Marchbanks, school lunch director for the Liverpool Central School District, is in charge of feeding Liverpool’s roughly 6,800 students. She said the disruptions in the supply chain are unprecedented.

“In my 27 years of working in school lunch, I have never served kids something I haven’t tried myself,” Marchbanks said. “Now I’m buying the kids the stuff that’s available.”

Vendors have been sending last-minute substitutions, throwing a wrench in Marchbanks’ carefully written menu plans. She spends much of her week tracking down supplies to fill the gaps.

“What used to take me 10 hours a week to order food for the district is taking me 30 hours,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t know until [the shipment] comes in and they just no-stock me and I don’t have anything.”

Chief among the items in short supply are meat and grains. Whereas in the past young Warriors might have seen chicken nuggets, patties and tenders on the menu throughout the month, now they might only see one of those options.

Marchbanks emphasized that the issue is not quantity — meals still meet the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s nutrition standards for kids — but variety. The choices for breakfast cereals and baked goods have dwindled to just one or two options, and the students’ picky palates can tell the difference.

“For weeks I’ve been having trouble getting cereal. I can get a no-brand cereal but I can’t get Kellogg’s,” Marchbanks said. “The kids notice they aren’t getting … the choices that they usually get.”

Liverpool high schoolers have long raved about a particular variety of burger— a 3-ounce, smoked beef patty. Marchbanks said she has been unable to get the smoky burgers since October, and to make matters worse, the facility that produces them recently burned down.

Manufacturers had enough items in storage to get through the previous school year, so supply chain issues only began affecting schools in the fall of 2021.

“You would have thought last year would have been bad, but no. … The issues began the very first week of September. I was getting substitutes which was very unlike the vendor,” Marchbanks said. “The supply chain has completely collapsed.”

Unlike manufacturers, schools often have limited storage and freezer space, so it is impossible to stockpile items to try to get ahead of substitutions and shortages.

The issues go beyond food. Paper trays, plastic sporks and soup cups have been hard to come by as well. In September 2021, North Texas news station KERA reported that the Dallas Independent School District began seeing shortages in plastic cutlery back in May and June 2021.

“Much like with a computer chip shortage that has affected the auto industry, early to mid-2022 is the expected date for the food distribution chain to settle,” KERA reporter Ana Perez wrote.

Labor has also been an obstacle for vendors. Workers at Kellogg’s were on strike for over two months in late 2021 before the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union and Kellogg’s were able to negotiate a new contract. President Joe Biden condemned Kellogg’s plan to replace striking union workers as “an existential attack on the union and its members’ jobs and livelihoods.”

Faced with increased workloads and overloaded trucks, drivers are taking jobs elsewhere, Marchbanks said.

“I had one of my suppliers say to me that guys will come and they’ll look at the truck and say, ‘This truck is too full,’ and they’ll leave and not come back. Being a trucker is a really hard and heavy job,” she said.

Katie Wilson, executive director of the Urban School Food Alliance, told the Wall Street Journal in December that distributors are focusing on moving product to more profitable customers than schools and other food service institutions.

Empty shelves are not an uncommon sight in grocery stores, but the problem is amplified for school food service departments, which are contracted to purchase from certain vendors.

“What I understand from the manufacturers is they’re putting the retail [production] lines first,” Marchbanks said. “Parents aren’t seeing the same thing in the grocery store that school lunch directors are seeing.”

In response to supply chain woes, the USDA released an additional $1 billion in Supply Chain Assistance funding to purchase fresh fruit, frozen vegetables, dairy products and ground meat. The Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program set aside $200 million for schools to purchase local products from “historically underserved producers and processors.” The USDA also will purchase $300 million in domestically produced food for schools as well.

“Because the government has been more generous in the reimbursement, I’ve been able to put more into fresh fruits and vegetables,” Marchbanks said.

Liverpool’s food service department has also brainstormed with the district’s career and technical education (CTE) and family and consumer sciences (FACS) departments about hydroponic gardens and the possibility of students producing some baked goods.

“I’ve already met with FACS teachers to see if some of the things the students are making we can serve at Wetzel Road,” Marchbanks said. “That isn’t meant to solve the food supply problem. That’s to give our kids practical experience.”

As food service directors must commit to suppliers for the 2022-23 school year, Marchbanks said she is hoping the supply chain situation improves and that creative solutions involving students could become a reality.

“We’ve talked a lot, we dream a lot, and hopefully some of those dreams will come to fruition,” she said.