Commissary
“Grab-n-Go” goes to school
By Herb Greene
FORT
LEE, Va. – Oh no! This can’t be happening. Your wife
had an early formation. The command group called and wants
you off leave and back on duty now. The school bus has
just turned onto your street and you haven’t made
lunches for the kids. If you’ve got packaged meals from
the commissary, however, there’s no need to panic.
Just open
the fridge and take out convenient Grab-n-Go items that
are a perfect fit for lunchboxes: milk boxes and packaged
sandwiches and pieces of fruit. Toss them into the kid’s
backpacks, which are almost as big as your field pack, and
there they go. In a flurry of hugs, giggles, dropped
books, barking dogs, laughing children and a honking bus
horn, “Grab-n-Go” has done gone and went . . . to
school!
In the
fast-paced world of the military, convenient and
affordable items in your commissary’s Grab-n-Go section
have taken on a new role for time-pressed parents of
schoolchildren: that of the traditional bagged school
lunch.
“We
didn’t plan it this way in the beginning,” said
Charlie Dowlen, a commissary management specialist who
oversees DeCA’s Grab-n-Go program. “What we wanted to
do was to provide individually packaged food items that
busy military personnel (that’s everybody in uniform)
and their families could get in a hurry for a quick lunch.
We place these items conveniently at the front of the
store where they are easy to find. These items are very
popular with busy people.”
Customers
can choose lunch items from a large selection of popular,
nutritious and affordable foods, Dowlen explained. He’s
not kidding either. DeCA has more than 175 items in its
Grab-n-Go assortment.
Dowlen and
others are constantly looking at new items and new ways to
make the service even better for commissary shoppers. Most
commissaries worldwide offer Grab-n-Go service, and
shoppers in a hurry love it. Prepackaged sandwiches, milk
and fruit are the most popular choices among the school
lunch customers. Other choices include yogurt, packaged
luncheon meat, crackers, muffins, fruit cups, salads,
sodas and bottled water.
Even if
you don’t have school-age children in your home,
Grab-n-Go items will fit into your menu plan quite nicely
the next time you are up against the wall and have little
or no time for food preparation. Just dash into your
commissary and “Grab-n-Go!”
