Foodservice forum: Education

What are the biggest issues currently in the education catering market?

Robin Givens
Managing director, Elior UK
The biggest issue remains inflation. The government’s standards for school food in England govern the nutritional values for school meals; for example, how much protein and fresh vegetables should be served daily, by weight and by variety. This is the standard caterers must deliver in the best interest of the children they serve. ensuring that they have the energy and nutrition they need. It is becoming increasingly challenging to meet these standards with the current escalating food costs.

Funding for Universal and Free School Meals is provided by the government. However, as funding struggles to keep pace with the rising cost of food, having good working relationships with our supply chain partners is essential to supporting us in delivering fantastic dishes at a fair price.

Taylor Shaw is doing lots of work in the background to deliver value and nutrition, without reducing standards. For example, meat protein can be costly, so we’ve now implemented meat-free Mondays. This delivers the required nutritional values at the same time as reducing costs. It is also more environmentally friendly and supports our environmental, social and governance targets.

The government increased the Universal Infant Free School Meals (UIFSM) funding by 7p-per-child in June, however, it is is not mandatory that schools pass this increase on to caterers. We are seeing many schools retain this monetary increase to put towards their rising fuel costs. We would urge the government to reconsider the criteria to ensure this additional funding is passed on to the caterer.

The other issue that education catering industry faces is the labour shortage that has arisen following Brexit and the pandemic. The industry needs to pull together to remarket itself, elevating service as a profession and making the sector more attractive.

There are 30,000 schools in England alone. With the right aptitude, there’s so much scope to accelerate through a profession in catering in schools and have a very fruitful career with numerous perks.

Despite these challenges, contract caterers need to go further than just putting nutritious food on the table. Value adds are just as important; recipe books, teaching children to grow vegetables, parent education and dinner clubs are all part of educating children on how to develop a healthier future lifestyle. Socialisation and education with the children we serve is a key part of our offering and the industry needs the correct resources to be able to do this well.

Engagement and education at primary level to establish the right habits is critical in starting children off on the right foot for a healthier lifestyle in later years. Taylor Shaw has recently implemented it’s Eativerse concept, which is designed to teach children the importance of eating a healthy, balanced diet in an interactive, fun way.

Julian Fris
Director, Neller Davies
Budgetary restrictions are an issue that impact both food on the plate, and the equipment and assets required to run a viable catering operation. Not only are we seeing less spend on food itself in real terms but less focus on maintenance of facilities too. This will have a significant impact on the efficacy of school meals. 

The age of assets in schools is a real issue. There has been a massive lack of investment and the standard of maintenance in schools is variable.
Clearly, given the wider issues with the economy, serious consideration needs to be given to the nutritional challenges facing children today. Many children rely on being properly fed at school. Free school meals are often the only decent meal available, so it’s vitally important that these are nutritious. 

Poor nutrition at home cannot be matched with poor nutrition at school. This will only result in poorer learning outcomes. 
The wider societal problems about food awareness and education for young people are still there. The future generations need to become more nutritionally literate and schools will have to do more to engage children in food. Not only do we need to see more of a drive from government, but caterers and schools will have to develop programmes to help young people to learn how to cook and understand the ingredients they are using. 
The people shortages largely affected by the impact of Brexit and the pandemic have hit the school catering market too, so novel approaches need to be considered to tackle this. 

We are likely to see more centralised approaches from local authorities or collaborations with multi-academy trusts (MAT) where central production kitchens will be introduced to look after multiple sites. Central production will then be supported by ‘finishing’ kitchens in each school. Not only does this help to reduce costs, but organisations can look to hire more skilled chefs and teams centrally to deliver higher quality nutritious food where ingredients can be closely monitored.

Despite these constraints, we see relatively good uptakes for school catering, but are concerned that standards which will provide good nutritional outcomes are being compromised to get throughput up and keep costs down at the expense of a decent diet.

In a recent study for an MAT, some 40% of kids regularly eat at fast food restaurants when not at school. There’s much to do, but centralising core food production and driving quality may be a start.

Steve Hawkins
Managing director, schools, Sodexo UK and Ireland
Rising food and energy costs are the biggest challenge facing school meal providers as we enter the new academic year. It is essential to maintain the quality of school meals in line with government guidance and individual contract specifications.

The main issue is managing the rising cost of school meals. It is essential that families are not put into the position where a school meal is out of the question due to increased costs. We are working closely with all our clients to seek ways to share the inflationary burden to minimise the cost of a school meal.

There are ways to minimise costs if you review the menu and your supply chain. We are looking at rationalising our stock keeping units to enable us to spend more while maintaining both quality and quantity, as we are opposed to reducing portion sizes to accommodate rising food costs.

Our supply chain team, dietitians and chefs regularly review our menus, and we have recently modified some recipes to include a higher proportion of plant-based proteins as part of our commitment to reducing our carbon footprint and to meet the trend towards plant based diets. We also have measures in place to reduce food waste, which provides additional cost savings, helping to balance the rising price of food.

This is not a new issue. Over the last 10 years, the amount of money that the government provides for free school meals has only gone up by 1.7%. The recent rise, the first since 2014, in UIFSM by 7p is simply not enough.

All school catering providers face difficult choices with the commercial reality we face ourselves in and, while the increase is welcome, it does not go far enough. There will be a point when tough decisions will have to be made about partnering when funding is not there

Another ongoing problem we encounter is schools reducing the lunchbreak. It is a daily challenge for our teams to serve school meals to the larger school populations when the time allocated, and facilities, are limited.

We’d like to see the government impose a minimum time allocation for lunch provision based on the school population. Technology is helping with easy-to-use, web-based pre-ordering systems, which reduce the need for children to queue, as each meal is made to order. We have seen sales increases of up to 22% at schools that have adopted our online system.

As a major provider of education catering services in the UK, we have a huge responsibility to educate the children and young people we cater for regarding healthy, nutritious eating. The more we can educate children about their food choices while at school, the more likely we will be to influence their performance while learning, their behaviours, and their health and wellbeing into adulthood.

We remain committed to providing children at our client schools with affordable, healthy and nutritious meals.

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