CATERING

The rising costs of key staples, such as food and energy, are continuing to have an impact on schools across the country, as business managers, bursars and senior leadership teams look to control their budget for the second half of the academic year.

What can schools do in order to be smarter when purchasing food items? And, importantly, how to do it without impacting on availability, quality, nutritional standards or exceeding budgets?

Below are some practical tips that school leadership teams can consider:

Through my involvement with catering in the education sector over the last 20 years or so, I have seen many business cycles. In state schools we have gone from the service of a very limited, home cooked but highly subsidised offer; to very commercial burger, chips and fizzy drinks with little staff input and profit returns; then Jamie Oliver’s intervention causing mass panic; to today, with the emergence of a more common sense approach. Today’s pupils are very “High Street” and value wise, but after the last 5 or so years of health messages, they are also looking for “good” food. Whilst most caterers and School Business Managers have great common sense, trying to comply with the onerous School Food Standards seemed impossible and with the resulting stagnation in sales and free meal uptake, not entirely the right strategy either. Certainly, caterers needed to improve things; as a father of four, I would not be happy with my children being offered burger and chips every day, however, to dramatically move to the full implementation of the standards was, in my opinion, too far too fast.

Through our recent tendering work with many secondary schools we are seeing an on-going development of excellent and exciting food offered to pupils. At last, the range of dishes offered each day is reducing so that real chefs and customer focused service assistants have time to improve the freshness, quality, presentation and service of real stone baked pizzas, hand carved roasts with all the trimmings and fresh vegetables, made to order hot salads, freshly battered fish and chips, whole roasted chickens, a deli offering a range of breads and fillings, the aroma of a real Italian cappuccino and fresh fruit and smoothy bars... I could go on!

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