USDA has announced new nutrition standards for school meals.

Participants: Gary Crawford and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

Transcript

After reviewing over 136,000 comments and more than 50 listening sessions, the Agriculture Department's come out now with a new set of nutrition standards for school meals.

Standards that will put limits on sodium and on added sugars in foods and in flavored milk.

I think all of this is designed to ensure that students have quality meals and that we meet parents' expectations that their children receive healthy and nutritious meals at school.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack telling reporters schools will have plenty of time to meet the standards.

It takes time to transition, to phase in a number of the aspects of this new rule.

And so you'll see a series of phasing in over the course of the fall of '25 to the fall of '27.

Bilsack said many schools are already meeting the standards and he pledged help and flexibility for those schools that are having trouble.

Gary Crawford for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.