School Lunch Collective Update 17 February

Feb 17
3 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Tēnā koutou,

Thank you all for your feedback and support we have received over the last three weeks, especially at a local level with recent severe weather events and several school closures. It means a lot to us to provide lunches daily, as we continuously strive to improve our services, your ease of working with us, and our menu options.

Driver Safety

Safety is our number one priority at the School Lunch Collective - you and your students | ākonga safety, our safety and the safety of everyone we interact with as part of the School Lunch Collective programme. As part of our safety focus, our Mt Maunganui team recently hosted a New Zealand transport police officer at the kitchen to discuss driver logbooks, safety and compliance. Pictured here with Julia Vermeulen, our Bay of Plenty Area Manager.

Pasta Salad back next Wednesday due to popular demand

We received very positive feedback about the Chicken Pasta and Tomato Pasta salads last week. The surplus meals returned on the day were two-thirds less than on a standard service day, with some schools having no returns at all. Based on this, we will be offering the salads once a fortnight for the remainder of Term One.

To ensure we meet our food safety requirements, we are using frozen gel packs to keep the salads cold. To avoid creating extra rubbish, please keep these gel packs inside the Cambro bins for return - our teams wash and refreeze them for future use.

Vegetarian salads will be clearly labelled, and if we cannot meet the dietary requirements for some ākonga, we will serve a hot dietary meal instead. Please ensure the hot dietary meals are served on arrival.

Upcoming Menu

You are welcome to click here to see upcoming menus: https://www.schoollunchcollective.co.nz/weeklymenupage. We keep this page updated with menu changes. To print a hardcopy of the menu, we suggest you "snip" the menu you want to print and then paste it onto PowerPoint or Word and print from there. We are working on a more direct-from-page print friendly option.

We can now Accommodate Coconut Allergies

The School Lunch Collective now includes coconut as part of the stonefruit allergy category. This means if you have a student | ākonga with a coconut allergy, you can now request a no-coconut meal by selecting the no stonefruit dietary tag option on the portal.

Cambro Bins and Deliveries

As part of our Food Safety management programme, our drivers are now recording the time of delivery to you, the number of cambros delivered, uploading a photo of the delivery, and then doing the same when we collect the cambros and surplus meals. Our Cambro food carrier bins are vital for our delivery system to ensure our food is served at the correct temperatures. Please help us by putting them at the collection point daily for our drivers to pick up, so we do not run out the following day.

If you need support with distribution within your school, please reach out to your MOE Senior Advisor or SLC Area Manager.

Improved Labels from our Central Manufacturing Facility, the Copper Pan Kitchen

Over the weekend, we installed a new label printer at our Central Manufacturing Facility for our standard meals. You will see the new labels starting to appear on meals in the next 3-4 weeks. You will easily be able to identify the meal name, batch and recipe code and see the allergens. This is a further support to our food safety programme.

These labels will also really help us if we ever need to do a food safety investigation. Should you have a food safety incident at your school, please remember to keep the meal and any evidence and call your local Area Manager right away.

Maximum Order Numbers return on the 23rd of February.

You will be able to see your Maximum Order Numbers on your My School/Deliverables section in the portal from next week.

There is some great information you help you to use the portal on the website: ORDERING HELP | School Lunch Collective. Otherwise, please reach out to your local Area Manager for support.

The Year so Far

For the first three weeks of the year, our average Delivery in Full on Time percentage was 98.33% excluding the BCP events at the Mt Maunganui and Whangārei kitchens.