Why cashless catering can help to keep allergic children safe

It’s vitally important to safeguard children with allergies – and when it comes to safeguarding, schools are on the front line.

We can’t afford to put children’s lives at risk. Unfortunately, the threat of allergies is about as dangerous as they come; anaphylactic shock is a real threat to child safety and could strike at any time. A single slip-up in vigilance could be disastrous.

So how do you ensure your students are safe from the threat of anaphylaxis?

A seemingly impossible task

Children are famously forgetful. You can’t tell them to self-manage their allergies and then wander off. There’s a good chance that they’ll come into contact with an allergen at some point in the school canteen.

With so much to keep track of, school meal allergens might seem like they’re bottom of the list. Besides, short of following them around at lunchtime, preventing a child from ordering a specific meal is an almost impossible task.

You can’t stamp out the allergies themselves – but you can stamp out the root issue of school anaphylaxis thanks to FasTrak.

Software can help to provide a solution

With modern cashless catering solutions from FasTrak, you can input allergies and dietary requirements for each at-risk pupil. Input allergens for each meal option you serve, and the system can automatically identify when a student tries to order a meal that could be potentially harmful.

If a meal included nuts, for instance, a warning would be served when an allergic child tried to choose it. The system could even prevent them from ordering that meal in the first place.

You can implement this technology at the register in the canteen or even in the classroom, well before lunchtime. Pupils can make meal selections on interactive whiteboards as part of morning registration. FasTrak even enables parents to make meal choices from home, which is great for primary school pupils.

How easy is it to get started?

If you choose a system that integrates with your school management system, it can pull allergy information directly from your records. This makes setup quick and painless whilst also securing the safety of every child in your charge.

You can use the FasTrak school meal management section to manage children’s medical information and food allergies, ensuring that they are locked out from purchasing unsafe meals. This also helps you to safeguard children’s personal data – their classmates don’t need to see information about their allergies and intolerances if they don’t want them to.

Other benefits of cashless allergy protection

Sometimes, anaphylaxis and allergic reaction can take a while to present symptoms. In these cases, it can be difficult or even impossible to trace the reaction back to a specific allergen.

However, thanks to the FasTrak system, parents can log in and see what food their child has ordered, along with allergen information. This makes it much easier to trace the cause of their child’s reaction.

If you’re interested in finding out more about FasTrak’s cashless catering and allergy protection, along with its other advanced school catering features, please contact the team today; we’d love to hear from you.