Cleveland Metropolitan School District moves nutrition operations into LINQ system

Cleveland Metropolitan School District has deployed LINQ School Nutrition to consolidate menu management, ordering, reporting, and direct certification workflows that had previously been handled across multiple tools and manual processes.

Cleveland Metropolitan School District has implemented LINQ School Nutrition as part of a wider effort to bring greater consistency and control to how its school meal program is managed at scale.

LINQ develops cloud-based systems used by school districts to manage operational areas including finance, HR, nutrition, and payments. Its nutrition platform is designed to centralize meal program administration that is often split across multiple tools and processes.

Before the rollout, key aspects of the district’s nutrition operations were handled through a combination of paper-based processes and separate digital tools. This approach made it harder to access up-to-date information across schools and increased the time spent reconciling data for reporting and compliance.

By shifting menu management, ordering, reporting, and direct certification into a single system, the district has brought those workflows into one operational environment. This change removes the need for parallel tracking and reduces reliance on manual data handling.

Eligibility data becomes part of day-to-day operations

One of the more significant operational changes is how direct certification data is handled. Rather than being updated through time-intensive tracking processes, eligibility information is now available within the same system used for daily nutrition management.

This allows district and school teams to work with current data as part of routine operations, rather than treating certification as a separate administrative task that requires later reconciliation.

The rollout also included support during a distributor transition, with ordering workflows integrated into the system to limit disruption at school level. This allowed nutrition operations to continue without requiring staff to switch between interim processes during the changeover.

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