The new, cut-price school lunch programme will shut out many community providers. But will bulk-supplied meals meet children’s needs? by Colleen Brown ● illustration by Anthony Ellison
It took just a six-month tendering process for the incoming coalition government to pick apart the free school lunch scheme, Ka Ora, Ka Ako, like a fussy child with a sandwich. Images of Associate Education Minister David Seymour sampling a new, cheaper, prototype meal were beamed across the nation in October. Money saved. Increased numbers of children fed. Job done.
Under the scheme’s new configuration beginning this school term, most of the 1013 participating schools and kura must either continue their own “internal” lunch supply system or go with new monopoly “external” provider the School Lunch Collective.
Previously, 156 external providers – from multinationals such as Subway and Pita Pit to small cafes and businesses using school kitchens – were in the market.
The new collective comprises UK-headquartered caterer Compass Group – best known here for hospital meals – Foodstuffs North Island-owned wholesaler Gilmours and tuckshop specialists Libelle Group. It has contracted with the Ministry of Education to supply lunches for $3 a head.
Schools that continue to do their own thing must supply a lunch meeting ministry nutrition requirements and weighing 240 grams for $4 a head. The ministry says the price difference recognises that internal providers don’t enjoy the economies of scale of large suppliers. Those going it alone can obtain supplies from Gilmours, use the collective’s pre-priced recipes, or source local supplies.
Schools may have a choice but it’s a rock-and-a-hard-place quandary. Providers say that without the advantage of bulk supply and economies of scale that the collective enjoys, it will be impossible to cover costs for $4 a head.
Nevertheless, many schools are attempting to stay local. According to the ministry, the School Lunch Collective will feed 127,000 children, internal providers 51,000, and iwi or hapū 8000 each day.
The new regime this year applies in secondary, full primary (Years 1-8) and composite (Years 0-13) schools. Other primary (Years 0-6) schools will be added next year, affecting a further 56,000 children.
Hunger harms
Hungry students struggle to learn – evidence of the multiple benefits of providing a nutritious lunch at school was well established before the then Labour-led government launched Ka Ora, Ka Ako in 2019. For many kids from low-income households or deprived areas, lunch may well be their only guaranteed meal of the day. In the US, England and many parts of Europe, supplied lunches have been part of public education for decades.
All school lunch providers interviewed by the Listener were sceptical that a healthy lunch meeting the nutrition requirements can be provided for $3 or $4.
The collective will provide meals made in 22 commercial kitchens nationally. Its $3 unit cost must cover ingredients, production, delivery to the school gate, collection of waste the next day, and payment to staff of a “living wage”.
Under the old scheme, secondary schools received $8.29 per meal; most primary schools budgeted for about $5 to $6 a head. Seymour claims the new model will save $130 million a year (the government allocated $478 million for the current financial year). He says the cost saving will come from the collective’s ability to negotiate bulk supply deals, supply chain efficiencies, reducing the number of unique ingredients and food items and buying seasonal produce.
He’s also promised that “woke” foods like quinoa, hummus and sushi will be off the menu in favour of sandwiches and fruit. But in the collective’s Term 1 offering, there are no sandwiches on the menu, and only one cold choice – chicken teriyaki – at the height of summer.
The standard menu (vegetarians and those with special dietary requirements are also catered for) is heavy on minced beef – cottage pie, pasta bolognaise, rissoles, “Mexican mince” – and kids’ favourites like mac and cheese and butter chicken. There’s little sign of 5+ A Day, though the mac and cheese and butter chicken are apparently vege-loaded.
A ministry spokesperson says meals are prepared and frozen, then thawed and heated for same-day delivery. Food safety issues rule out fresh items such as salads and sandwiches being delivered at this stage. As the new regime progresses, such items will become available, the spokesperson says. Secondary students will get a snack on top of their 240g meal, which may include fruit. All meals will meet nutrition guidelines, including for vegetable content.
Recipe tricks
Manurewa High School in South Auckland has run a school lunch programme since Ka Ora, Ka Ako’s inception. It plans to continue its in-house operation, but expects a significant challenge to make ends meet.
Lunch programme co-ordinator and cafe manager Steve Smith leads a team that will deliver 3000 meals a day to students at Manurewa and three nearby primary schools. Smith is well qualified to front the enterprise – he spent 30 years as a chef and worked in airline catering. He’s succinct: “The numbers are up and the cash per student is down.”
Last year, he worked to a budget of $5.56 per primary student in Years 0-3, $6.52 for Years 4-8 and $8.29 for Years 9-13.
Manurewa High has 2200 students, a roll made up of 51% Pasifika, 33% Māori, 12% Asian and 4% others. Smith has 13 staff working in the kitchen; a typical day starts at 5am. When the Listener visited late last year, the menu included a chicken rissole with kūmara and seasonal vegetables topped with a creamy lemon sauce. Vegetarian meals were available, as were cold meals if students were off site.
Three covered food collection areas act as serving stations around the school. Girls walk by, talking and laughing as they tuck into their meal, younger students cluster on nearby steps, eating and chatting. Two young men walk past carrying two meals each. Smith shrugs: “Growing boys.”
Manurewa has always offered a meal weighing in at 320g, with a snack on top giving each student about 400g of kai.
Smith knows the grams required for each dish and the food students will eat. He knows all the tricks to get students to try new flavours and vegetables.
“They never see the cauliflower in their rice,” he says. “They have no idea that what they are eating is very healthy food.” Students are given protein each day, usually meat, and have come to accept the range of vegetables included in their food.
But this year, there is the gap between the $4 payment from the government and the real cost of providing wholesome food.
Children are inherently honest about what they like to eat. Smith gets hailed as “Mr Lunch Guy” when he delivers food to the nearby primary schools. The shout-out is often accompanied by a high five. Primary students get smaller portions from the same menu as the older children, with any spices toned down.
At the high school, student Ocean Rogers, 17, who has completed her NCEA Level 2 requirements, is helping kitchen staff clear up. A keen baker, Rogers’ goal is to own her own bakery; her favourite recipe is a brownie that sells at the school cafe for $2.50 a slice.
“It’s more than a full belly,” says Rogers. “It’s about supporting our students and people in our community who can’t afford to buy school lunches. It’s about learning new skills. I love my baking. I bake at home, too.”
Smith knows that to make ends meet under the new regime, he can no longer afford to employ all his 13 staff.
For the past two years, every supplier had to provide its menu and recipes every term to ministry dietitians to confirm it met nutritional guidelines before it was paid. This year, recipes will not need pre-approval for funding but will still need to meet guidelines.
The ministry says its dietitians “review the provision of complex dietary meals where there are students with rare, medically prescribed dietary requirements. The School Lunch Collective also has dietitians working alongside the ministry.”
Manurewa principal Pete Jones backs its school lunch programme 100%. “No student needs to be hungry at Manurewa. It has removed a barrier to learning and it supports whānau and our community. By operating in-house, we are showing innovation, entrepreneurship, community service, plus offering local employment opportunities.”
Jones believes the programme shouldn’t be a political football. He is critical of a system allowing the larger players to dominate the market, squeezing out smaller competitors. He fears the big players will eventually be able to demand their own price.
Jones knows Smith will be working miracles to get nutritious food delivered to his contracted schools, working with fewer staff to produce more with roll growth. He points to Finland, with a similar population to New Zealand, where the state has supported a school meal programme for 70 years. The Finnish school lunch philosophy is “an investment in the future”. Literature about the programme notes it “goes beyond the plate of food”, citing high returns on investment in education, gender equality, health and nutrition, social, economic and agricultural developments. In the most recent figures available (2017), the Finns were investing NZ$7-$9 per student meal.
Smith would settle for $6 a meal. To help manage costs, land next to the school is being turned over to vegetable production: this year, it plans to grow five tonnes each of potatoes and kūmara and more than two tonnes of cabbage.
Surely, we should be able to afford to give our kids a decent lunch that isn’t price driven?”
David Seymour was invited to Manurewa to see its programme at work but declined.
Jones says his long-term hope is for a change in government to one that funds the programme to the right level to make sure his students thrive.
The free lunch programme was launched in 2019 at Kaitao Intermediate in Rotorua. The school, located in a less-affluent socio-economic area, has about 300 students, 65% of them Māori, the remainder Asian, Pākehā and Indian.
Kaitao principal Phil Palfrey says there were teething challenges with the scheme, especially the gulf between meeting ministry nutritional guidelines and what children would actually eat. Waste was an issue. “Five years on and we’ve figured it out. Our caterer is a local guy I can call any time to sort out issues, such as how our students react to certain meals.”
It’s a community effort, with the supplier and school catering staff all locals. Palfrey says the practice of communal eating, involving staff and students, has brought the school together. For many students, this is a new experience. There is little waste and the children’s behaviour has improved, as have their learning outcomes.
Palfrey is worried about the new $3 meals; he knows students will leave food they don’t like the look of. Then there is the economic impact of the supplier and three staff at the school losing their jobs. He notes the supplier was a phone call away; he’s not optimistic about dependency on a computerised system.
“It’s diluting the good things we’ve built here. You can feel the wairua when you arrive; it’s a visceral thing now. Surely, we should be able to afford to give our kids a decent lunch that isn’t price driven?”
Bad fit
Like many school leaders, Leisha Byrnes, principal of Lincoln Heights Primary School in West Auckland, holds a holistic view of what a school meal contributes to a child and community’s wellbeing. It’s a full primary of about 500 Year 1-8 students, which means it must take lunches from the collective this year.
When it first entered Ka Ora, Ka Ako, meals were provided by a large contract caterer. It was a bad fit, and Byrnes spent the next two years trying to withdraw from the contract. “The quality was awful, there was enormous wastage, which was sent to a local pig farm. We had issues with delivery times, with meals arriving around 2pm, often due to the traffic. It wasn’t right for our community.”
Byrnes sourced a local provider, Claire Kelly’s Lunch With Crunch. The pair worked closely to create a menu to suit the school community. Food waste fell from about 70% to 2%.
Lincoln Heights runs two lunch sessions where teachers and students sit in school whānau groups, a karakia is said, the food is placed in bowls, and the older children help the younger ones with serving. Eating together has become the norm for children who often had little to no experience of sharing a meal or using utensils properly.
“Our school community knew Lunch with Crunch cared about us,” says Byrnes. “We were a team, and our community benefited from it. Mums were employed, our school was meeting environmental goals, and our children were well fed and thriving.”
The quality was awful, there was enormous wastage, we had issues with delivery times.
The school bought a commercial dishwasher; Kelly invested in crockery and last year spent $80,000 upgrading the company kitchen on the understanding her school contracts would continue for a further two years. But it all came to a halt with the September announcement that all full primaries would move to the new scheme this year.
Kelly has had the rug pulled from her business – losing an estimated three-quarters of her income. The community has lost as well, with 27 of her 38 staff losing their jobs. She is perplexed there was no opportunity to talk to the ministry about businesses like hers that created local solutions with measurable outcomes.
And the school has to return to a system similar to the one that failed it first time around. “We know Auckland traffic and the long delays on our roads,” says Byrnes. “Just think of all those trucks delivering [hot] food across Auckland daily, in preference to local innovative solutions.”
Like other principals who used local providers, Byrnes worries about the redundancies, loss of skills and local knowledge.
And she is concerned about waste management, with leftovers not collected until the following day. Schools are responsible for meal delivery and waste collection within the school grounds. The ministry will give each school between $4750-$10,450 a term for this, depending on size.
More than money
At the other end of the motu, Janice Lee is founder and leader of Māori kaupapa organisation Koha Kai, which delivers community programmes in Murihiku/Southland. A contractor to Whānau Ora among other activities, it provides work for disabled people, creates healthy lunches for students and the elderly, grows vegetables and runs gardening workshops for those in lower socio-economic areas, all delivered in a culturally appropriate way.
Koha Kai used to deliver school lunches to eight kura in Gore, Waihopai and northern Southland, clocking up 196km per round trip. This year, it is contracted to deliver to only one urban school and three rural ones on that same long loop.
Lee knows it is critical to get food to rural communities; Southland farmers are struggling and free school lunches ease cost pressures on many families. The four urban kura Koha Kai formerly serviced are not happy they have been directed to have an external provider.
“David Seymour sees the lunches in schools programme as a financial transaction – nothing more,” says Lee. “In negotiating for the cheapest price, he doesn’t appear to have any concept of the additional benefits to communities he is taking away.”
For those creating and serving and receiving the kai, there is agreement that school lunches are more than simply transactional. “It takes a village to raise a child,” says Lee. “[There is] a whakataukī: ‘He iti rā, he iti māpihi pounamu – though we are small, what we offer is of great value.’
“Children need to know that someone knows them, cares about them and their families – not seeing them as a burden for which they can assign a dollar value to their wellbeing and expect them to be grateful.”