FAQ

Breakfast Club of Canada is dedicated to providing comprehensive support tailored to each school’s unique needs for setting up or strengthening their breakfast programs. The Club has the operational and strategic capabilities to help each school successfully run their breakfast program. We are proud to bring these resources to the table:

• Operational skills encompassing equipment delivery, training, capacity building, evaluations and reporting.
• A collaborative and flexible approach to student nutrition, allowing us to customize our support to meet local community needs and maximize each program’s potential.
• Robust relationships with existing private, public and community stakeholders to successfully raise awareness and educate the general public.

Whether it involves establishing a new breakfast program or strengthening an existing one, we provide schools with the funds, kitchen equipment, tools, support and training they need to make it happen. In Quebec, the Club can also facilitate the delivery of food to schools or organizations. The Club’s support resources are always evolving and can be adapted to your situation!

The objective for the Club’s Guiding Principles is to offer a shared vision for breakfast programs to our team and our partners, whether they are schools, community organizations, philanthropic or government agencies. These principles serve as a compass that directs our collective efforts toward building the best-possible school breakfast programs. Our Guiding Principles embody the values that we aim to apply to our work, enabling us to respond to the needs and realities of every school community that we support.

The Club’s Guiding Principles can be found on our website here.

The Club’s nutrition guidelines can be found here.

They have been developed by our Nutrition Committee to help school and community partners create healthy school food environments.

In developing these guidelines, we relied on evidence-based research and Canada’s Food Guide to reflect best practices in school nutrition.

All our menus for programs that include food delivery are also reviewed by our Nutrition Committee.

If you are looking for additional resources to inspire you, help you with planning breakfast, promoting healthy eating habits and creating a warm and welcoming breakfast program, please go to the Resources page of the School’s Corner and look at our diverse inventory of resources in the “Nutrition” section, which includes menu plans, a recipe book and much more!

A universal breakfast program goes beyond merely providing food—it adopts an inclusive and stigma-free approach to ensuring all students have equal access to breakfast, without any sense of shame or discrimination. A child might not have breakfast before coming to school for many reasons, such as limited access to nutritious foods at home, lack of appetite early in the day, a hectic morning routine or a long bus ride.

This program’s primary goal is to make breakfast easily accessible to every student, without any barriers or distinctions. It should be openly promoted within the entire school community to raise awareness, and students should have the freedom to choose whether to participate on any given morning.

To create a stigma-free environment, it’s essential that all breakfast programs are universally accessible. This means they should be designed and implemented in a way that ensures every student feels welcome and comfortable participating, regardless of their socio-economic background.

We understand every school has different realities and needs. While your Club coordinator is always happy to give you some ideas and suggestions, your program’s service model is yours to choose and adapt to suit your needs. Some schools choose to offer hot meals served in a designated room. Others choose to offer, for example, in-class breakfast and breakfast bags. With the Club’s Guiding Principles in mind, your program’s logistics are yours to determine.

Schools are at the heart of the process and are the real operators of a breakfast program. The Club supports them through its expertise in every aspect of setting up their program and throughout the school year. Watch a short video on the Club coordinator role here.

However, it’s up to the school to mobilize its staff, recruit its volunteers and maintain its coordinating committee. Depending on the program model in place, each school is also responsible for providing additional funding, if necessary, purchasing food, managing food shipments from the Club and delivering and servicing a high-quality program that meets your unique community needs.

You can also ask school staff to get involved in their program. Indeed, breakfast time is an excellent opportunity to create social-emotional ties with children beyond the school curriculum. Teachers can also make curriculum-related connections, such as learning mathematics—by asking children to prepare a budget for the program’s food purchases. We also encourage schools to involve student volunteers in their breakfast program, mainly because it is a good way to build their self-esteem, develop their leadership potential and learn new skills.

Compliance with the food safety measures issued by your provincial government is essential to the success of a breakfast program. Local school authorities may also have additional guidelines to follow. Please refer to both government and school requirements when deciding how to operate your program.

For the Province of Quebec, each program must obtain a permit issued by the Ministère de l’Agriculture, des Pêcheries et de l’Alimentation du Québec (MAPAQ) and meet all applicable MAPAQ hygiene and sanitation requirements. Your coordinator will keep you updated on any training or refresher sessions provided by the Club. For more information, read the Safe Food Handling section of our School’s Corner page.

Your team’s composition will depend on your chosen service model, menu and student attendance. Typically, your breakfast program team should be composed of at least one head volunteer or one person in charge of the program. In addition, you can call upon school staff, students or community volunteers to help with daily operations. To get a clear idea of your staffing needs, talk to your Club coordinator. Visit the Volunteers and school community section of our School’s Corner page to obtain volunteer recruitment tools.

If you are looking for resources on various program development topics such as laying the foundation for a breakfast program, engaging volunteers and the school community, budgeting and fundraising, nutrition, creating a nourishing environment, program evaluation and more, please visit our School’s Corner  page. Plus, your Club coordinator is always available to help you develop your program. Vitamin C, our newsletter regarding breakfast programs, offers inspiring and nutritious ideas, presents best practices adopted by programs across the country and provides you with the latest news about the Club!

Programs funded by the Club are asked to report on program details and impacts twice a year. Typically, reporting occurs:

• February (for the September – January term)
• June (for the February – June term)

Reporting instructions are emailed to the school’s main contact, including additional resources to help complete the report.

The questions are primarily focused on student attendance and program support, like additional funding and volunteer/community assistance.

Qualitative questions, such as your assessment of the program, testimonials or best practices, may also be asked.

While it is not mandatory to submit your receipts in reports, best practices in financial accountability recommend retaining receipts for a period of five years.

Including breakfast program funding in your report is crucial—to both confirm that your school receives adequate funding and provide the Club with a clear picture of the necessary resources to maintain a robust program at your school. Additionally, awareness of other support sources can benefit other community programs.