BATON ROUGE, La., Jan. 23, 2006 (PRIMEZONE) -- A partnership between Piccadilly Food Service and Healthy Lifestyle Choices (HLC), a non-profit organization dedicated to risk behavior reduction and obesity prevention, aims to improve school lunch programs across the Southeast. The program is based on HLC's discovery that children educated about nutrition are more willing to try new, healthier foods.
Piccadilly Food Service offers schools a menu of nutritious meal options incorporating requests and feedback from the students, teachers, faculty and parents at each school. To ensure the success of the menu, focus groups of students are invited to "tasting parties" to sample the menus. HLC also provides innovative packaging for the meals, featuring cartoon character mascots, puzzles and links to their interactive website. This combination of nutrition education and student involvement increases the potential acceptance and utilization of the school lunch program.
"Our goal is to lay a foundation of nutrition knowledge that will last a lifetime," said Dee Fuchs, President, Healthy Life Choices. "This is an exciting partnership because the students and faculty help to transform their school food services. In the end, students will be exposed to a greater variety of healthier choices, impacting what they eat in and outside the school environment."
"We want schools to know that we can help them design a meal program that is healthy, driven by student choice, and with the added benefit of a nutrition education component," said Paul G. Tuennerman, Vice President of Piccadilly Food Service. "Our school lunch partnerships are a true collaboration to improve the quality of the school dining experience. Our affiliation with HLC takes it a step further to also provide students with important nutrition knowledge and skills."
About Piccadilly Food Service Division
Piccadilly Food Service is a Division of Piccadilly Restaurants, LLC, more commonly known as Piccadilly Cafeterias, is headquartered in Baton Rouge, La. Founded in the vision of T.H. "Tandy" Hamilton, the Piccadilly philosophy is simple -- serve top-quality food at reasonable prices. Now, after more than sixty years of consistently delivering on this promise, Piccadilly is positioned to bring this same passion and commitment to on-site dining service management. For more information, visit the company website at www.piccadilly.com/foodservice. To find out more about bringing Piccadilly to your school, contact Paul G. Tuennerman, Vice President, at 225-296-8361.
About Healthy Lifestyle Choices
Healthy Lifestyle Choices (HLC) is a non-profit organization dedicated to youth risk-behavior prevention. Through the development and implementation of a school-based curriculum and a school culture change program, HLC has documented significant increases in health knowledge and behavior change among participating students. HLC programming aims to reduce obesity, violence and substance abuse, and improve the safety of children. For more information about HLC, visit their website at www.hlconline.org.