Saffron Proves Tangible Benefits For Healthy School Meals

October 2005

Bury MBC Leisure Services Catering adopted FDH’s Saffron solution during 2004 to replace the FDH MICa management and control system which had been operating throughout its 78 schools since 1995. The Saffron system was chosen to provide the management team with a valuable and powerful business reporting and modelling tool and in the future on-line web access.

Following the success of their partnership with FDH, and the current climate with regards to the health and nutrition of school meals, the natural progression was to install the Saffron Nutrition module. Mike Rogers, Head of Catering for Bury Leisure Services explains the reasoning behind the decision: “Our team were already using the Saffron system successfully throughout our primary and secondary schools and the inclusion of the Nutrition module has enabled us to be pro-active with regard to the implementation of recent government nutritional standards.”

Bury’s primary schools already had a strong policy of providing healthy school meals with low fat, low sugar and low salt menus in place. However, there was no way of checking exactly how healthy these menus were. Saffron’s Nutrition module now provides the accurate data on all its menus and also enables the evidence of compliance, which will be required by 2008. Initially, the Caroline Walker Trust Standards were input into the system and accurate tolerances could be set and checked for all schools menus. Latterly, the standards recommended by the Independent School Meals Review Panel have been introduced into the module.

Mike Rogers adds: “Using the Nutrition module has allowed us to introduce both Summer and Winter healthy menus into our primary schools, which are very close to compliance with the new regulations – 2 years in advance of the deadline. In addition, the accuracy of the module has highlighted certain products that are high in salts etc. This has allowed us to open up discussions with producers and suppliers in an attempt to reduce these ingredients in their products.”

One of Bury MBC’s Saffron users summed up her thoughts: “Saffron was so easy to use, flexible and produces the information that the service needs and the school heads want .”

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