Meet Solana, The Cloud App that Tracks School Lunch
If you’ve kept up with the news headlines on social media, you’ve probably noticed a trend concerning American school children’s responses to their school lunches.
Pictures of food that appears to be barely edible are routinely posted on Twitter with witty hashtags that mock the government officials who were instrumental in passing reform in the America’s lunchrooms.
Solana, a SaaS product by Horizon Software, looks to change the way parents and children look at lunch in America’s schools. Solana is being described as an accountability software for school lunchrooms. Solana helps lunchrooms stay in compliance with federal regulations while providing children with healthy and flavorful options for lunch.
There are no products like Solana out on the market today. Solana was built using the cloud and Solana’s interface was built by the same group that built the POS GUI for Subway, Wendy’s and Starbucks. Horizon Software built Solana using the direct feedback that it solicited from school administrators. Horizon Software says that they conducted field tests and usability tests, in order to build Solana to spec.
Solana integrates into the MyPaymentsPlus platform, an online payment system that parents can use to buy school lunch for their students online. Real time reporting is built into Solana, so that administrators can build reports based on lunch and gain actionable intelligence regarding the food that they decide to serve.
Horizon Software says that a typical school district can implement Solana in about 3 days. For districts worried about putting private information within the Solana’s cloud, Horizon Software mentions that they built Solana so that the system could receive approval from HIPAA, PCI and other recognizable privacy standards. Since Solana is built in the cloud, school districts will never have to commission their IT staff to perform an upgrade. Solana simply upgrades itself when patches are available.
Randy Eckles, President of Horizon Software, was quoted in a press release saying, “In addition to offering a leading-edge system built for simplicity, accuracy, and speed of cafeteria lines, we wanted to take the IT responsibility from our customers.”
Eckles adds, “Solana dramatically reduces the time, expense and support required to implement a state-of-the-art school nutrition platform, allowing our customers to focus on their main priorities of serving nutritious, convenient and affordable meals to students.”
