School meal standards

We are committed to providing great taste, great nutrition and great value to our customers.

We believe the meals we provide can make a valuable contribution to the health and wellbeing of our customers and to the district as a whole. So we’re focussed on maintaining high service standards and working in a way that gives assurance to the thousands of customers we serve each day.

It’s our aim to provide first-rate standards of school catering and customer care. We strive to ensure that our service is delivered by well trained staff within a friendly, welcoming atmosphere and in a way that is responsive to the diverse needs of all members of the community.

Schools provide an ideal environment for change and we recognise that the dining room environment offers the opportunity to promote children’s health, through good nutrition. So we encourage good nutrition as a sound base for good education.

Food standards

Food in schools has been subject to increasing levels of government regulation since 2006.

Their initial food based standards set out requirements about how often certain foods were allowed or needed on the menu (for example oily fish, red meat, chips etc). It also banned certain food items, for example confectionery, crisps and sugary carbonated drinks.

For the schools where we provide the catering we take on full responsibility for compliance with current government standards for school lunch provision.

Staff training

In recent years we have intensified our efforts to develop the talents of our catering workforce. This training provides our staff with the skills to make better use of our quality food ingredients and helps ensure that the overall lunchtime experience is thoroughly enjoyed by all our customers.

All staff receive training to meet minimum legislative requirements, for example Basic Hygiene Qualifications. They are also trained in appropriate areas such as:

• food safety and hygiene
• nutritional training 
• food preparation 
• health and safety 
• customer service 
• halal awareness 
• craft skills

This investment into our staff helps in developing a well trained, motivated and flexible workforce which is better equipped to meet the needs of our customers.

Halal meals

We provide an extensive range of frozen Halal and Asian vegetarian foods that have been produced specifically for schools, to comply with government nutritional standards for food in school.

In the Bradford district, our provision of halal meat meals for schools began in 1983, and from the outset we established a close working relationship with our local community and the Bradford Council for Mosques. This helped to make sure the correct procedures, training and good practice were in place to certify that the food provided to our customers complied with Islamic requirements.

Maintaining the confidence of our Muslim customers in the integrity of the Halal food we provide is vital and needs rigorous checks throughout the entire food supply chain. Independent inspection is carried out at each stage of our supply chain to verify compliance with the requirements of Sharia law.

On this page we have included some documents that contain details of the approach and processes we use to ensure the integrity of our halal food.