Kam S. Phillips-Sadler
Chief Executive Officer
Llewellyn Jenkins
President
Shivam Tandon
Vice President, Finance
Rhonda Radigan
Vice President, People Operations
Chelsea Harrison
Vice President, Parachute
Shannon Tapp
Director of Marketing
Hannah Smith
Director of Customer Operations
Jay Peters
Chief of Staff
KidKare by Minute Menu is the industry leader in easy-to-use software for the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP). Our tools help streamline the task of processing monthly Food Program claims for sponsors, single-location childcare centers, and family childcare providers.
Our solutions offer a range of features including financial expense management, attendance tracking, and meal planning. These extend from generating income and expense reports to producing invoices and monthly statements. Serving over 75,000 sponsors, owners, directors, sites, and providers across all 50 states, we have fostered enduring relationships with our customers.
Thanks to our dedicated employees and unique caring culture, we’ve gained a loyal customer base that has fueled our growth. Our partnership with Alpine Investors will enable us to continue offering the most comprehensive Food Program solutions to sponsor organizations and providers. Meanwhile, we’ll also be exploring innovative ways to serve the childcare industry.
Our company was founded in the early 1990s by Tom and Linda Clark, who saw an opportunity for automation to reduce the enormous paperwork burden on sponsors and providers in the child and adult care food program (CACFP). Like so many small businesses, they worked on their idea in their spare time, while working other jobs, and poured their hearts and souls into the promise of helping good people do good work and creating a company to support their own family.
It took a while, but T&L (Tom & Linda) Computer Systems finally found a handful of customers for its Minute Menu System software. And those forward-thinking customers spread the word about the difference that automation was making in their business. After a few years, T&L Computer Systems was a nice, small family business, and the Clarks were able to quit their prior jobs to focus on refining the Minute Menu System and serving their customers.
When the welfare reform hit in the late 90s, the CACFP introduced “means testing,” a tiered approach to reimbursement, which added a level of complication to the program that required automation to get right. Suddenly the phones were ringing off the hook at T&L, and what was a small but successful business started a growth trend that hasn’t stopped.
Over the years since, we branched out from family child care homes to centers and center sponsors. We acquired a couple of smaller competitors and expanded our products to include so much more than could have been imagined when our founders started the business. We changed company names a few times and eventually became Minute Menu Systems, LLC. We went from DOS-based software and Scantron forms to cloud-based offerings with a mobile, responsive user experience. We grew from a tiny staff in a home office to more than 30 employees, including former CACFP sponsors, center owners, and family child care providers. Along the way we built a company that values the opportunity to work for such an important purpose — America’s children.
In 2017, after 26 years at the helm of the company, Tom Clark retired, and we partnered with Alpine Investors, who are committed to carrying the vision of Minute Menu Systems into the future. With our new KidKare platform, we hope to reach even more families and child care providers to enhance their childcare experience, supporting caregivers and working families in whatever ways we can dream up.
As the story of our company continues, we honor our beginnings and the people who have made this company what it is today. We continue the legacy of finding ground-breaking ways to help children receive nutritious meals while supporting quality child care for America’s working families.
