Solution to Foodservice: Inspiration from James Bond

Once the province of the FBI and criminal investigators, fingerprint technology is now being harnessed at K-12 schools around the nation. Not for Orwellian motives such as surveillance, identification or tracking, but for school lunches and breakfasts. Biometrics, the science of identifying a person by unique biological features such as fingerprints or iris patterns, has finally made the jump from James Bond’s gadget lab to the school cafeteria, in the case of fast, secure identification and transaction processing. Problems with Cash, Ticket, and Card-Based Lunch Systems The growing interest in fingerprint recognition at public schools stems from the serious drawbacks of traditional lunch payment systems. Though handling cash is routine for adults, the process can be difficult for students, especially younger ones prone to losing or misplacing it. Besides this, there are still a lot of problems from slow lunch lines, lost lunch money, cumbersome payment, lunch fraud and bullying, to falling National School Lunch Program (NSLP) participation, along with declining reimbursement for programs such as Title I, E-rate, and No Child Left Behind, which use the NSLP data to gauge poverty. Furthermore, while federal law prohibits schools from overtly identifying those receiving free or reduced price meals, color-coded lunch-tickets are employed to designate free or reduced price lunches, thus identifying them as “poor” in the eyes of their peers. This can substantially reduce federal reimbursement for poverty-based programs linked to school lunch counts. Magnetic-stripped cards, one alternative to cash or lunch tickets, while convenient, get lost, stolen, destroyed, or misused in alarming numbers. In fact, over 70% of students will typically need to have their swipe cards replaced each year, on average, at considerable expense. Fingerprint Technology Quickly Gaining Ground In K-12 Food-service With the serious drawbacks of traditional lunch systems, it’s no wonder that a growing number of K-12 schools are turning to fingerprint ID lunch systems in an effort to speed operations, simplify payment, limit lunch fraud and bullying, as well as improve lunch participation and program reimbursement. In the schools implementing such systems, the results have been impressive. Without cash, tickets, or cards to be located or exchanged, lunch lines move faster and students have more time to eat without rushing. Because there are no color-coded tickets or different amounts of cash involved, nobody knows who is buying a free or reduced price lunch. This eliminates the reputed stigma of being a “free lunch student”, which can help boost school lunch participation and federal reimbursement via the programs tied to it. How about fears of privacy link-out? Mitch Johns, president of Food Service Solutions (www.foodserve.com) the company that implemented the fingerprint solution, is quick to point out that his system does not store any fingerprint images in its database – just mathematical algorithms that cannot be used to recreate fingerprint images and are therefore useless to law enforcement. Fingerprinting is voluntary and typically done when the student enters the school system along with enrollment paper-work. Kids are fingerprinted just once, and the mathematical algorithm produced stays with them until they graduate. Those declining fingerprint IDs can continue to use cash or other methods. Source: http://www.foodservicecentral.com