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, start by building individual meals for snacks, breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Then add food items and meal components, including custom items, from the food library (for example, whole milk). Once created, it is saved as a reusable template that can be assigned out to rooms and dates as needed.

When building menus in brightwheel, CACFP guardrails automatically run real-time checks to ensure required meal components are included.

If anything is missing, you’ll receive immediate feedback so you can make updates early, reduce claim issues, and feel confident your menus meet CACFP requirements before meals are served or claimed.

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

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.