Connect My Food Program

If your program participates in the Child and Adult Care Food Program and your sponsor has you on My Food Program for claims, you can connect the two systems. Staff and families keep checking children in and logging meals in NestliCare, and NestliCare sends the attendance and meal count records to your My Food Program account every night.

The claim itself still happens in My Food Program: income eligibility, claim generation, and submission stay there. NestliCare replaces the re-typing, not the claiming.

Before you start

• You need a My Food Program account for your site, and the API key from its account settings. If you can't find the key, ask your sponsor or My Food Program support.
• Connecting is owner/super admin territory: Settings → Integrations.
• The Integrations tab shows for US organizations.

Connect

1. Go to Settings → Integrations and find the My Food Program card.
2. Paste your API key and select Connect. That key is the only thing you enter. NestliCare looks up your site by name. If your key covers more than one site, pick the right one from the list.

Match children and rooms

My Food Program keeps its own list of enrolled participants and rosters. NestliCare fetches them and matches against your children by name and birth date:

• Match found: same name and birth date on both sides. Accept it as-is.
• Possible match: same birth date and a partly matching name (a nickname, a changed last name). Check it before accepting.
• Not matched: pick the right participant from the list, or leave it unmatched.

Select Accept suggestions to take every automatic match at once, adjust anything that looks off, then Save matching. Do the same for rooms, which match against My Food Program rosters.

Only matched children are sent. A child not yet enrolled in My Food Program simply stays unmatched until your sponsor adds them there. Then they appear in the matching list.

What gets sent, and when

• Daily attendance: check-in and check-out times for matched children.
• Meal counts: which matched children had which meals (breakfast, AM snack, lunch, PM snack, supper), by room.

Records go out automatically every night. Send now pushes yesterday and today immediately, which is useful for the first send after matching, or after fixing a record.

A few rules worth knowing:

• Records already sent are not sent again unless they changed in NestliCare (a corrected check-out time, for example). Changed records are re-sent as updates, so the corrected times replace the old ones in My Food Program.
• A meal marked not claimable in NestliCare is not sent.
• Meals in a room that isn't matched to a roster are skipped, and the sync log tells you which room needs matching.
• If My Food Program is not set up to serve a meal at your site (an AM snack when the site only defines breakfast, lunch, and a PM snack, for example), that count comes back as not accepted. The sync log names the meal and what to do: ask your sponsor to add it in My Food Program, or stop logging it in NestliCare. It is retried on every send until one of those happens.

Menus come the other way

Attendance and meal counts flow out of NestliCare; menus flow in. If your program plans menus in My Food Program, NestliCare imports them as published meal plans, so staff and families see the day's menu without anyone re-typing it.

• The coming week imports automatically every night.
• Import menus on the connection card pulls any date range (up to a month at a time) on demand.
• Imports never touch a day you already planned in NestliCare. If a slot has a NestliCare meal plan, the imported version is skipped and the card says so.
• Imported items keep their My Food Program food components, so the meal-pattern check grades them like any other plan.

A meal type NestliCare does not have yet (for example an evening snack) is skipped, and the card's import notes tell you which ones.

Reading the sync log

The card shows your recent syncs: what was sent, what was skipped, and why, in plain words. A yellow entry means some records need attention: skipped (usually an unmatched room) or not accepted by My Food Program, with the reason spelled out. A red entry means the send failed, most often an expired or changed API key. Reconnect with the new key and use Send now.

Disconnecting

Disconnect stops the nightly sends and clears every match. Records already in My Food Program stay there; nothing is deleted on either side.

Common questions

Day-to-day questions after you are connected, from unmatched children to not-accepted meals, are answered in My Food Program questions, answered.