GRUB MASTER PROTOCOL

The following information is offered in the hopes of making the job of a patrol grub master and his parents easier.  When it is your son's turn to be grub master for an outing, the patrol will have prepared a menu at a troop meeting.  It is then signed-off by an ASM.  He will do his best to edit it for nutritional balance and estimate if it will come under budget.

 

When you take your son shopping, please consider doing the following:

 

• Guide him in writing up his shopping list based on the menu.  Encourage him to group like items together, just as you do when you are shopping. 

 

• If the patrol only needs a small quantity of something, please donate it from your own kitchen.  For example, enough salad dressing for a patrol of four to six scouts can be decanted into a smaller bottle, saving the troop the expense of a Costco family-sized bottle, and saving the scouts room in their patrol ice chest.

 

• The troop owns enough patrol-sized ice chests for each patrol to use one for each outing.  Please have your son contact the patrol’s quartermaster to get the ice chest assigned to them prior to the outing.

 

• He is responsible for the shopping; don’t do it for him while he’s at school, and let him push his own shopping basket around the store.  If you have your own shopping to do, have a separate basket for your own family.

 

• As he is choosing items, help him choose each based on what is on sale that week, using the unit pricing to teach him what the best values are.

 

• If the patrol wants something that is individually wrapped, talk about the extra costs involved.  For example, would buying one big bag of potato chips help keep the patrol on budget if individual bags push them over?

 

• Take along a calculator and have him enter the price of each item as he places it in his shopping basket.  That way it will be clear how much he’s spending before he goes through the register, and it is too late to make any changes.

 

• Don’t forget to purchase ice to pack along with the food.  If your refrigerator is too full to accommodate the patrol’s food between your shopping day and the outing, consider buying double ice.  You can store the patrol food in their ice chest until right before the outing, and then replace with fresh ice just before they leave.

 

• After the outing, help your son assess his purchases.  Did they have enough of everything, or too much of anything?  If a small quantity of something is leftover, consider it your repayment for whatever you donated out of your kitchen.  If there was a large quantity of something leftover, such as unused cans of food, it would be preferable to not bill the troop for it, but instead, deduct it from the Request for Reimbursement and use it yourself.

 

The bottom line is that the patrol must come under budget in order to be reimbursed by the troop.  If they go over, the additional costs are to be distributed evenly among the participating patrol members.  The current budget for outings is $4.00 per person per meal.  Oftentimes dinners will cost more than breakfasts, so it is all right to average the costs for the weekend, just as long as the patrol comes in under budget for the whole outing.