Enable Grain Ounce Equivalents

A grain ounce equivalent is the amount of food product considered to equal one ounce from the grain group. As of October 1, 2021, all food program participants must use grain ounce equivalents when serving Bread/Alt and Infant Cereal food items. This is to account for different levels of water content in different grains, which affects the amount of actual grain content in the food. For example, cooked pasta and rice has higher water content than crackers or bread. Ounce equivalents aims to ensure that the appropriate amounts of grains are served.

You can enable this requirement in your policies. Once you enable grains ounce equivalents, the following changes will be applied to Minute Menu CX and KidKare:

• Your will be able to add grain ounce equivalent calculations to Bread/Alt and Infant Cereal food items on your food list. Each food that falls into these two meal components must have an equation on file. Error # will display on the Office Error report for claimed Bread/Alt and Infant Cereal foods that do not have an equation saved to the food list.
• All quantities for Bread/Alt and Infant Cereal food items will reference grain ounce equivalents when estimating required quantities, recording actual quantities and leftover quantities (if you do so), and when viewing reports such as the Menu Production Record, Weekly Quantities Required report, and the Infant Feeding report. Claims processing will also reference the new ounce equivalent serving requirements as outlined by the USDA.

To enable the grains ounce equivalents requirement:

1. Click the Administration menu and select Manage Policies.  The Manage Policies window opens.
2. Set policy M.17 Use Ounce Equivalents for Bread/Alt & Infant Cereal Foods to Y. If you do not require centers to report actual quantities served, go to Step 4. If you do, continue to Step 3.
   
3. If policy M.01 is set to Yes to require actual quantities, you can specify how your centers record ounce equivalents. Policy M.01g How do you Want to Handle Recoding Bread/Grain & Infant Cereal Food Components is set to Y by default to use the calculation saved to your food list when recording quantities. Set this policy to N to require your sites to record bread/grain quantities in ounce equivalents only.
   
   • If this policy is set to Y, your centers will record quantities in a common unit of measurement that is then calculated to ounce equivalents:
     
   • If this policy is set to N, your centers will record quantities in ounce equivalents only.
     
4. Click Save.