Technology Helps Tailor Secondary School Meals
To Student Eating Patterns

            

Lincolnshire County Council is one of the largest local authorities in the UK to roll out nutritional analysis integrated with cashless catering technology within secondary schools.

The authority, which has 60 secondary schools in its area, is utilising Saffron Nutrition provided by catering IT specialist Fretwell-Downing Hospitality and the cashless catering system provided by VeriCool.

The council’s catering team had already installed Saffron Nutrition for use centrally by a team of six nutritionists to ensure that the menus created and rolled out to the 280 primary schools met the nutrient standards which came into force in September 2008. However with a further set of nutrient standards applying to secondary school meals from September 2009, the local authority has extended the use of the nutritional analysis software and integrated the technology with the cashless catering system to provide further feedback in a more complex catering environment.

In this way the authority is aiming to monitor the impact that the new menus have on individual pupils so that it can tailor the provision of the service to ensure take-up is maximised. This is of particular importance in a secondary school setting as greater menu choice and the variety in student tastes are recognised as the key challenges in balancing and maintaining meal uptake once the nutritional standards are in force.

The Saffron Nutrition software includes a core bank of 200 recipes. Each secondary school is licensed to access the software online, and is able to modify and add to the recipe bank to reflect actual cooking methods and ingredients used specifically in each kitchen. This improves the accuracy of the nutritional analysis of each menu served.

Having completed a successful pilot and taken the first training, on-site catering managers are currently inputting recipes based on their own method of cooking. Further down the line they will be trained how to cycle these with the core bank of recipes.

The technology has been installed across the 60 secondary schools which are divided into 10 groups of six, enabling the central team to monitor the nutritional analysis of each group simultaneously, including qualified nutritionists who are working with these clusters to provide support and increase confidence. Prior to adopting the technology, a member of staff would have visited every school each week to nutritionally analyse the menus, but with Saffron Nutrition on-board, just one sixth of this resource at county level is needed, allowing the authority to prepare for the impending legislation within budget.

By linking the nutritional analysis technology with Vericool’s cashless catering software, the authority is now also able to filter the information based on actual meals consumed. For instance, as well as analysing the nutritional value of the menu based on an assumed number of portions, the catering team can drill down to see the impact of any menu changes on the eating behaviour of individual students.

This builds on the authority’s current studies of children’s eating patterns, which have shown that after the first few years at secondary school, students tend to adopt a ‘grazing’ eating pattern, preferring to eat small single items on a regular basis rather than the traditional ‘meat and two veg’ served at primary school level.

David Saunders, Coordinator for Food in Schools for Lincolnshire County Council comments: “Saffron Nutrition with Vericool is a highly cost-effective solution to enable us to meet and prepare for the new school standards in September 2009, enabling all schools within the Lincolnshire local authority to share best practice via a central resource.

“The user training and customer support provided by Fretwell-Downing Hospitality has made a significant impact in easing the pressure on logistics for catering managers. The opportunity to monitor nutritional performance across the district simultaneously, rather than exhausting resources and staff conducting weekly analysis at each school site, has enabled us to continue improving our catering facilities within budget, which greatly contributes to the added-value for the school children within the Lincolnshire area.”

As the catering industry continuously seeks to improve nutritional services, the opportunity, with the Saffron Nutrition and Vericool technology in place, is to work with the data to provide analysis for different social groups and individuals.

David Saunders continues: “We are aware that a high uptake of 1st and 2nd year secondary school students use the catering facilities provided in school, and we are looking at ways to maintain the interest of the older pupils. The strategy over the coming years is to upgrade our facilities to a restaurant-style approach.

In addition, over the last three years we have increased our hot meal provision in primary schools from 30 schools to 243.

“The software package enables us to monitor the influence of these changes on the nutritional behaviour of our school children based on year groups and will better inform future approaches to offering the best possible service.”