OBJECTIVE: To characterize the National School Food Program in Santa Catarina State. METHODS: This quantitative, exploratory, cross-sectional study used an online questionnaire to collect data from 293 municipalities in Santa Catarina from February to May 2010. The descriptive variables were analyzed according to their absolute and relative distributions. The software Stata 11.0 used the Chi-square test for comparing groups with a significance level of 5% (p<0.05). RESULTS: The questionnaire response rate was 74.4%. Some municipalities had: centralized management of the National School Food Program (97.7%); up to 10 schools (58.7%); up to one thousand students enrolled in public schools (55.1%); one dietician (91.7%); up to ten cooks (49.5%); and up to two thousand meals served per day (61.9%). A few (2.8%) municipalities did not have a technician in charge of the school food. The mean cost of each meal was ≤R$0.30 in 21.6% of the municipalities and varied from R$0.31 to R$0.90 in two-thirds of the municipalities. Municipalities of different sizes or Human Development Indices had similar mean meal cost and number of meals prepared per cook per day (p=0.584). Small municipalities (p<0.001) and those with medium Human Development Indices (p<0.001) were more likely to have a proper dietician-to-student ratio. CONCLUSION: There is an inadequacy in most municipalities regarding the number of nutritionists. To establish minimum standards of adequacy between the number of cooks and meals served is necessary, beyond the need for financial incentives regarding workforce and meals costs.
School feeding; Public policies; Food and nutrition programs and policies
