Brightwheel’s Menu planning feature helps providers create and manage detailed food menus by room, saving time and keeping your staff informed.

You can build reusable menu templates, add meal components using the food item library, and export menus for compliance reporting.

To create a menu template, you'll first build individual meals (snack, breakfast, lunch, or dinner). Then add food items and meal components from the food library. Once created, it is saved as a reusable template that can be assigned out to rooms and dates as needed.

When creating a menu, CACFP guardrails run real-time checks to ensure required meal components are included. You’ll get instant feedback to fix issues early and confidently meet CACFP requirements before serving or claiming meals.

Visit Manage CACFP guardrail settings to learn more or disable these alerts.

You can also select a preset age range while building meals, and we’ll auto-fill portions to meet CACFP minimum requirements for each meal.

If you operate on weekends, enable Show weekends to add meals there.

When building a menu template, save time by copying meals to other days or duplicating entire weeks to build multi-week menus.

Just hover over a meal or week, click the three-dot menu, and choose Copy or Move to select a new day.

When building meals, you can select one of our preset age ranges and we’ll pre-populate portions/quantities to align with CACFP minimum required portions. You can always modify or choose to leave portions out of your planned meals.

When building meals, click Apply portions for to select the age ranges 1-2, 3-5, or 6-12 yr.