Impact at scale: A school meal innovation’s growth journey
Explore how School Meal Planner (SMP) PLUS is revolutionizing school feeding, impacting millions of children across the globe.
By Julia Dalibor
For many vulnerable families worldwide, sending children to school and providing them with a meal during the day can be challenging. School Menu Planner (SMP) PLUS, an innovative tool developed by the World Food Programme (WFP), aims to change that. This piece explores the journey, impact and future potential of SMP PLUS in transforming school feeding globally.
For many vulnerable families around the world, sending their children to school is a luxury. Children are often needed at home to help with household chores or contribute to the family’s livelihood. However, keeping children from school comes with a number of risks. Girls, in particular, face higher risks because they are more likely to be withdrawn from school to help at home or reduce expenses, leaving them vulnerable to societal pressures. This increases the likelihood of forced marriage, often seen as a way to ease financial burdens, and early pregnancy, due to limited access to education and resources about reproductive health. A daily school meal can be a powerful incentive to keep children, especially girls, in school.
WFP studies show that children receiving daily school meals attend school more regularly, stay in school longer and perform better academically (State of School Feeding Worldwide, 2022). To address these challenges, WFP has supported national school meal programmes in more than 100 countries. Over the past six decades, these programmes have been proven to promote better health and nutrition among children. One key initiative is School Menu Planner (SMP) PLUS.
Leveraging optimization technologies and advanced mathematics to automate the design of nutritious, cost-effective and locally sourced school menus, SMP PLUS reduces the cost of meal planning, improves the nutritional content in school meals and boosts local food procurement. With the help of the WFP Innovation Accelerator, SMP PLUS received support to lay the groundwork to pilot its technology across multiple countries. Today, SMP PLUS’ technology has expanded to support the design of school meals in 17 countries and plans to deepen engagement in the 66 countries it has already reached.
Scaling SMP PLUS: The journey through the WFP Innovation Accelerator
Each year, the WFP Innovation Accelerator hosts multiple Innovation Challenges, seeking groundbreaking solutions that provide relief, build resilience and contribute to ending hunger.
In 2018, a WFP internal team working on school meal programmes proposed an innovative idea: SMP PLUS. While traditional menu creation often struggles to balance nutrition, costs and available resources, SMP PLUS aims to optimize this process. Factoring in local supplies, nutritional requirements and costs, SMP PLUS delivers faster, cheaper and higher-quality meal planning for schools. By the time of the application to the WFP Innovation Accelerator, key features of what later became the full SMP PLUS had already been tested in the Dominican Republic and Bhutan.
#1 Laying the Foundation: The Bootcamp
The SMP PLUS team was selected to participate in the WFP Innovation Accelerator Bootcamp, a five-day, high-intensity workshop to dive deep into challenges, ideate solutions and refine the project roadmap. During this phase, SMP PLUS developed its governance structure and strategy. The bootcamp also helped the team expand its network with key tech partners and stakeholders.
#2 Accelerating Growth: The Sprint Programme
Following the bootcamp, SMP PLUS entered the WFP Innovation Accelerator’s Sprint Programme, an intensive six-month acceleration phase designed to help innovations move from proof-of-concept to tangible prototypes ready for real-world implementation. Teams receive up to US$100,000 in funding, world-class mentors and access to WFP’s global network of partners and field operations. Through this support, SMP PLUS was able to pilot at the Punakha Central School in Bhutan in 2019, resulting in a 20 percent cost reduction and a 70 percent increase in locally procured food. In Sri Lanka, SMP PLUS addressed menu costs and advocated for increased budget allocations, resulting in doubled funding per child.
#3 Scaling Success: The Scale-Up Enablement Programme
SMP PLUS then advanced to the Scale-Up Enablement Programme in 2020. This stage is designed to support advanced-stage innovations which have already proven their project concepts within WFP field operations and are working to optimize their impact and reach at regional or global levels. With the support of the WFP Innovation Accelerator team, SMP PLUS expanded significantly over three years, integrating deeper into various school feeding programmes across the world.
Prior to participating in the WFP Innovation Accelerator programme, SMP PLUS had shown promising results in reducing costs and increasing local food procurement in pilots. By the time it graduated from the Scale-Up Enablement Programme in August 2023, SMP PLUS had expanded to 17 countries and included new features such as digital training materials and distribution dashboards to support global adoption and operational efficiency.
SMP PLUS is now a successful WFP Innovation Accelerator alumnus and operates in 17 countries.
Real-world impact: SMP PLUS success stories
SMP PLUS has made significant contributions to improving school meal programmes worldwide.
In Madagascar, SMP PLUS played a pivotal role in supporting the national school feeding programme. By designing locally sourced, affordable menus, SMP PLUS enabled schools to optimize nutrition while identifying key food groups for home-grown school feeding purchases. In Madagascar’s 2024 school meal plan, 59 percent of food will be locally procured, with WFP supporting further integration of local staples next year.
© WFP Photolibrary
In Lesotho, SMP PLUS helped advocate for increased school feeding budgets, resulting in a 65 percent increase in funding from 2023 to 2024. The tool also diversified school meals, increasing food groups from four to eight and introducing ten local ingredients. SMP PLUS is now a key tool in Lesotho’s national school feeding policy, benefiting nearly 295,000 children across 1,400 schools.
The road ahead: Future growth and impact
The journey of SMP PLUS underscores its transformative impact on school feeding programmes worldwide. In 2025, the School Meals and Social Protection Service plans to work more closely with the 66 countries already using SMP PLUS, supporting government goals to improve school meal menus and set new guidelines. With plans for more training and implementation, SMP PLUS is adding new features to better meet the nutritional needs of millions of children. With ongoing support from the WFP Innovation Accelerator, SMP PLUS is set to reach even more children, promoting healthier and more sustainable school meals around the world.
The WFP Innovation Accelerator sources, supports and scales high-potential solutions to end hunger worldwide. We provide WFP staff, entrepreneurs, start-ups, companies and non-governmental organizations with access to funding, mentorship, hands-on support and WFP operations.
Find out more about us: http://innovation.wfp.org. Subscribe to our e-newsletter. Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn and watch our videos on YouTube.
