Online CACFP Training

CACFP Annual Training for Child Care Centers is a 3 hour comprehensive online course designed to provide annual required training for sponsors participating in the CACFP.

CACFP Annual Training for Homes is a 3 hour comprehensive online course designed to provide annual required training on meal patterns, the reimbursement process, accurate meal counts, claims submission, and recordkeeping for day care homes participating in the CACFP.

How can you make an impact to your budget and your menu in one change? Plan your menus according to the seasons. In this one hour session, participants will learn about growing seasons for different regions of the US, how to plan menus with built in flexibility for seasonality, and maintain CACFP meal pattern compliance.

Helping children get the nutrition they need for health and growth is what summer meals are all about. Creating appealing menus can help kids fuel up, have fun, and get the nutrition they need for growth and good health. This course will explore many ways sponsors can plan menus that kids will enjoy such as using local fruits and vegetables, adding variety and color, and making healthy meals fun!

This course is designed to provide effective training tips for child nutrition program staff trainers. The course will review the trainer’s role and the necessary competencies, learning styles, and effective training strategies for in-person and virtual training to enhance their training effectiveness and create a conducive learning environment.

Having excess inventory on hand can be costly, but not having enough inventory on hand can result in not serving enough food, and ultimately non-compliance and findings. In this one-hour session, learn how to calculate adequate inventory needs, while also learning how often inventory needs to be completed and best practices for stock rotation.

Program institutions and facilities receiving federal financial assistance are required to comply with federal civil rights laws to ensure all Child Nutrition participants have equal access to all benefits and services. This course will review Civil Rights regulations, and provide all information necessary to ensure that your program is in compliance with these requirements.

This course provides a comprehensive understanding of social determinants of health and their impact on health equity for children. It explores the various factors that influence health outcomes, including economic stability, education access and quality, healthcare access and quality, neighborhood and built environment, and social and community context. The course emphasizes the role of child nutrition programs, the importance of addressing health disparities, and promoting equitable opportunities for children.

What an exciting opportunity to impact children’s nutrition and health by being able to incorporate meat and meat alternates into your breakfast menu. Throughout this interactive one-hour course, participants will explore meat/meat alterations, their health benefits, and learn best practices to incorporate them into their CACFP breakfast menus.

Do you wonder how CACFP benefits the participants in your organization? Are you unfamiliar with the goal of CACFP? Are you wondering what CACFP even means? Then this is the course for you! Over the next hour, we will dig into the basics of the Child and Adult Care Food Program and how it supports children and adults each and every day.

This is a 1-hour training course designed to provide child nutrition program operators with the information they need to accommodate participants’ dietary needs as it pertains to fluid milk consumption. This training covers important topics including creditable milk types per age group and meal service, methods for accommodating special dietary requests and disabilities, and allowable fluid milk substitutions.

With Fruit and Vegetables now separate components, there are endless possibilities in incorporating great nutrition into your CACFP menus. Discover the great nutrition fruits and vegetables provide, which are the best sources of Vitamin C and A, and how often you should plan to serve them in your menus. Learn new and exciting best practices for introducing new fruits and vegetables on your menus across all meal services, as well as innovative preparation techniques.

Participants will learn behavioral strategies to motivate children to make healthy choices. Participants will understand how to be good role models for healthy eating and engage children in fun activities that inspire curiosity about food.

Basic Scratch Cooking Skills for Child Nutrition Programs is a 1-hour training course designed to provide anyone with cooking responsibilities in Child Nutrition Programs with the basic skills they need to begin preparing food. This training covers important topics including the benefits of cooking from scratch, basic knife types and knife cuts, different kinds of cooking methods, and a brief overview of developing standardized recipes and using cycle menus.

Did you know that choking is the 4th leading cause of death for children under age 5? Have you ever thought about what might be a choking hazard in your CACFP Menu? In this engaging one hour study, participants will learn common food choking hazards, explore cooking methods to prevent choking hazards, and learn best practice service methods to prevent choking in their child care setting.

This course will examine the growth and development of infants and how to make healthy food choices for infants to support this development. We will review breastfeeding, bottle feeding and introduction to solid foods. Participants will be able to select healthy menus and understand the CACFP meal patterns for infants.

Multicultural Menus: Diversifying Meals in Child Nutrition Programs is a 1-hour training course designed to provide Child Nutrition Program operators with the skills they need to incorporate regionally diverse meals into their program. This training covers important topics including the importance of providing multicultural meals, methods of implementing a taste test, and ways to adapt menus to provide a range of multicultural dishes.

Once you have the CACFP meal pattern compliance mastered, the next step in planning CACFP meals is making sure you cover all the basic nutrition needs. In this one hour session, participants will learn the importance of where the CACFP meal pattern comes from and how to incorporate basic nutrition into CACFP menu planning mastery.

Want to serve CACFP Snacks, but you are limited on preparation space? Want to learn what snacks you can serve in a pinch when you are short on staff? In this one hour session, participants will learn how to provide variety in a CACFP menu, while still striving for optimal nutrition with a snack meal that requires little to no preparation.

This training provides an overview of gluten-free diets, including identifying gluten in food and preventing cross-contact. Participants will be able to identify foods that contain gluten, find gluten on food labels and determine strategies to meet the needs of children on gluten-free diets.

Program institutions and facilities receiving federal financial assistance are required to comply with federal civil rights laws to ensure all child nutrition program participants have equal access to all benefits and services. This course will review civil rights regulations, and provide all information necessary to ensure that your program is in compliance with these requirements.

One of the hardest parts of planning a CACFP menu is understanding if a food is creditable or not and how much you need to serve. In this brief overview, participants will learn about tools to guide them to determine if a food is creditable to the CACFP meal pattern, and how much they need to serve to be in compliance.

This training is all about the Child and Adult Care Food Program or CACFP. The course covers topics such as what the CACFP program is and what it does, who is eligible to sponsor or offer the CACFP and which children are eligible to participate or receive meals through the program. In addition, the course covers CACFP meal patterns, how to accommodate children with disabilities that affect the diet and recordkeeping requirements that are important for everyone involved with the CACFP to be aware of – even teachers!

This training provides an overview of food allergies, an explanation of regulations for labeling food allergens, and a description of best practices for food allergy plans. Participants will practice finding common allergens on ingredient lists and identify practices that will keep children with food allergies from coming into contact with food that could trigger a reaction.

One of the hardest parts of planning a CACFP menu is understanding if a food is creditable or not and how much you need to serve. In this brief overview, participants will learn about tools to guide them to determine if an infant food is creditable to the CACFP meal pattern, and how much they need to serve to be in compliance.

Explore how to enhance your CACFP meals and decrease food waste by planning and preparing meals that appeal to all 5 senses. In this one hour session, participants will learn how to examine menus and prepare meals that not only taste great, but look, smell, feel and even sound great!

Spend the next hour with us learning about basic food safety and sanitation principles! We’ll review why food safety is an integral part of your operations, the dangers of foodborne illness, and how to apply these lessons to your day-to-day tasks and activities. This course will also cover motivating employees to follow food safety processes and protocols. Feeding children and adults is a noble profession – don’t let a food safety slip mar the reputation of your program!

With a destination of great nutrition and better lifestyles, learning how to incorporate whole grains into your CACFP menu can be a journey. In this one-hour session, participants will punch their ticket and board the whole grain express train, learning about where whole grains come from, how to incorporate them into their menu, and best practices for the preparation methods.

Wanting to learn how to optimize your CACFP Snack Menu, inventory, and labor? Through this one hour session, participants will learn how to use pre-planning methods to optimize their labor hours, kitchen space and equipment, and inventory to build a CACFP Snack Menu from semi-scratch cooking methods while being mindful of budget and nutrition.

Children learn about the world around them by experiencing and exploring their environments. Giving children opportunities to explore and experience their food by touching, tasting, smelling, seeing and hearing it taps into their natural curiosity and uses their preferred mode of learning to teach them about good nutrition from an early age. What they learn about food and nutrition can have lasting effects into adulthood. Let’s spend the next hour learning about the five senses and how to pique that natural curiosity with fun and easy sensory-based food and nutrition education activities!

The first challenge is planning a CACFP Menu, but the challenge can continue in figuring out how to prepare food in healthy ways. Learning how to prepare food in a healthy way can maintain optimal nutrition and increase food consumption while building lifelong healthy eating habits for children.

Are your meals lackluster? Want to increase flavor, decrease plate waste, and increase meal consumption without making a huge impact to your budget? Step into the world of flavor, spices and seasonings! Take a trip through the herb garden and around the seasoning world while learning how to incorporate herbs and spices into your CACFP menus.

This course will give CACFP sponsor monitors an outline of their responsibilities for conducting successful reviews of centers or family day care homes. They will better understand the requirements for reviews and how to assess compliance with USDA regulations. Finally, they will be able to recognize problems that would result in review findings.

In this course, participants will learn to recognize the 6 key indicators for a CN Label is, what a product formulation statement is, and how to use them to build a cycle menu. In addition, participants will explore the vast resources of USDA Standardized recipes, and will learn how to scale these recipes and products to fit their production needs. Lastly, participants will understand the basics of record retention and what documentation would be needed to support food production records, if required by their state.

How important is menu planning to a meal program? The menu plan influences every aspect of the meal program – including purchasing and preparing foods, ensuring that your meals are CACFP creditable, providing adequate nutritional value, accounting for dietary restrictions, and satisfying the tastebuds of the children in your care. In this one hour session, participants will learn about standardized recipes, cycle menus and the benefits of using both of these great tools to maximize kitchen efficiency and food budgets.

All Child Nutrition program operators must procure all goods and services using the federal procurement regulations. This course will define informal procurement thresholds, and the main steps involved in procuring food. It will offer practical strategies for purchasing, and provide resources to ensure that the meals served to program participants are reimbursable.