Food for thought: Monroe couple dreams up way to serve learning with lunch

BY POLLY KEARY, STAFF WRITER

For Roger Hammond, 33, of Monroe, the light went on a year and a half ago when he noticed his wife Bridget, 33, writing little National Geographic facts on their 6-year-old son's lunch bag before he left for school. “I asked her, 'Where did you see this? Oprah or something?' She said 'No, I just thought it would be fun for Ethan,'” said Roger. I said, 'Let's see if we can develop it for kids all over. Eighteen months later, here we are.”

“Here” was a busy Starbucks last Tuesday morning, and on the table between the lattes was a shiny pack of brown paper lunch bags, labeled “The Learning Lunch Bag.”

On each of the brown paper lunch bags is printed a list of questions, one question for each grade level. And there are different sets of bags for five different subject areas. The bag on the table Tuesday was drawn from a science and health set, so all the questions related to the physical world. The questions for the elementary grades were easy enough: “True or False, Cake is a good choice for a healthy snack,” reads the question for the first grade. But by the seventh grade, the question is a little tougher: The natural limits of behavior are A) tolerance B) addiction C) inhibitions. A peek around the side of the bag reveals the answer to be C) inhibitions.

There’s a lot of opportunity to learn in a package of Learning Lunch Bags; each pack of 50, good for about a quarter of school, only repeats each bag once. And that repeat may improve the effectiveness of the product. “Kids retain better when they see something a second time,” said Roger, who spent months researching the market and science around children, food and learning. The advantage to having all the grade levels represented on each bag is that younger kids can read ahead.

“If your kids are in the second grade, they can look ahead,” said Bridget, 33. “Our son likes to read ahead and see if he can get to the 10th grade.” Devising hundreds of questions and answers for the bags was a big job, the Hammonds soon realized. So they worked with a company that provides educational resources for home-schooling parents. They are confident that kids will read the material thus devised. “When kids get a Happy Meal, they read the bag,” said Roger. “When they eat cereal, they read the box.” But it’s a long way from an exciting idea to a product on the shelves of Safeway. To get there, Roger and Bridget partnered with a creative friend, Scott Lindley of Sammamish, and the three developed a prototype. Then other people got enthusiastic and invested money, and last month, the first 50,000 bags were produced at a plant in the Midwest.

Roger is meeting with Costco and other big retailers in the coming weeks, hoping they will agree to stock the product. In the mean time, they are developing an internet outlet, www.learninglunch. com, for their company, where people will be able to subscribe to the product, getting a new set of bags with new questions quarterly. At about $6.95 per set of bags, the Hammonds realize that their product is considerably more expensive than a plain brown bag. But at about eight cents a day more than the traditional bag, it is a good investment, they said. “It gives your kids the feeling that you care about their education,” he said. “Studies show that kids whose parents take an active role in their education are significantly better off.” Already the product has gotten a big break. “We're partnering with Wonderbread and Nestle to sponsor a 1,500-brown-bag lunch at the National PTA Conference in Phoenix, Ariz., June 22,” he said. “And we have the National Education Association meeting the following week in Orlando.”

Those meetings, they hope, will help introduce the bags to hundreds of people that will be interested in their product and will recommend it to others. The Hammonds hope to have the product in place on store shelves in time for back-to-school shoppers in the fall. But one person who really wants a Learning Lunch Bag when she goes to school in the fall is disappointed. Tessa, the Hammmonds’ daughter, found out that her new kindergarten at Fryelands Elementary, doesn't have lunch. So she won’t get her first Learning Lunch Bag until the first grade.

The original article appeared in the Monroe Monitor (Page 1   Page 2) on May 23, 2006