White Castle may have made the slider famous (think the 5-cent tiny square burger topped with onions and pickle slice), but these days Heritage students are making sliders that are not only famous, but nutritious.

Students have been working on creating original slider recipes as part of Enriched Family and Consumer Science, while at the same time creating ad campaigns in their Enriched Business class to market their sliders with style.

The partnership between teachers Lynn Schwartz and Jennifer Larsen led to the Heritage Slider Challenge, culminating with the crowning of the best slider in middle school.

Creative sliders were topped with everything from pumpkin seeds to hummus. Taste mattered, but so did marketing, slogans and nutritional value when it came down to The Slider Challenge … The Finals.

A team of judges, nutritionists from ShopRite of Livingston, the superintendent of schools, and Heritage principal, and the school’s food provider Aramark, had a tough choice between The Chick-Waffle Special by the Chicken and Waffle House and FalaFull. In the end, it came down to presentations, flavor and nutrition with the falffel, pita, humus, Iraseli salad slider edging out the waffle-based competitor.

Watch for it soon on the menu of the Heritage cafeteria.