Saffron Nutrition leads the Market with three new clients

February 2005

Helping School Meal Caterers prove Healthy Meals

Nutrition and monitoring of school meals has never been so far up the political and the nations agenda. The government has recently announced an investment of an extra £280m over three years to improve school lunches following a campaign by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver and his TV program.

FDH fully supports the Local Authority School meal caterers, we understand the issues and concerns they have. FDH continues to support both LACA and APSE as catering focused organisations as well as being able to offer a management tool to help the caterer prove they do offer healthy nutritious balanced menus.

Saffron Nutrition has been designed to be flexible and easy to use by local catering staff, allowing them to plan their menu based on cost and nutrient balance. Allowing them to concentrate on the day-to-day function of running a busy and demanding school meal business.

Andrew Markwell , Business Development Manager FDH comments, “School meals are the building blocks to our children’s health and education, and support LACA and Local Authority caterers in this task. We designed Saffron Nutrition to be an easy to use tool for caterers allowing them to prove they do offer healthy meals, and where necessary amend to suit their local requirement and guidelines. I welcome these new clients to the FDH family of users and look forward to a long mutual partnership”

 

Healthy Food for All  

Bury MBC Leisure Services Catering operates in 83 schools, including 13 high schools. The Leisure Services Division also provides banqueting and buffets via the Central Cook Chill/Cook Freeze facility to civic suites and buildings throughout Bury.

Saffron was first installed at Bury MBC Leisure Services Catering division in September 2003. The Saffron system is being used to control the school returns and produce detailed management information. Now, Bury have widened the scope and have introduced the Nutrition element of the Saffron Solution. This module will be used to monitor and analyse the school meal offer for both primary and high school, and will also be used to scrutinize the menu selection for Civic catering, so offering a healthy choice for all.

 

Monitoring the New Nutrition Guidelines for School s

Dudley Catering Service part of the Education and Longlife division of Dudley MBC recently selected FDH for the installation of Saffron Nutrition to analyse their school meals offer to both primary and secondary schools. Dudley Catering Service already offers a varied and balanced menu selection as part of their School Meal Initiative. One of the ways it is doing this is by setting minimum national nutritional standards for lunches for pupils in schools. This is where Saffron will help by analysing the menu cycle for both cost and the nutritional content and then monitored to defined guidelines including Caroline Walker Trust.

Julia Nichols, District Manager (Procurement and Marketing Co-ordinator), will have the system installed on her laptop allowing her to use the system mobile whilst visiting the schools.

Julia comments “We have been looking to nutritionally analyse our menus for some time, saffron provides what we were looking for and compared with other systems we saw is easy to use. So far the implementation support has been excellent”

 

Providing Heathly Food and a balanced diet

South Gloucestershire Catering Services, an in-house division, provides around 4 million meals per year to include Schools Catering, Community Meals and Staff Refreshment. It employs over 500 staff across 130 sites within South Gloucestershire and holds the "Hospitality Assured" award of excellence.

They already provide a healthy balanced offer and use food sourced from local suppliers as part of their policy, but needed a solution that will assist them to analyse the selection in further detail and model the menu to provide the best option both nutritionally and within budget.

After reviewing several systems they selected FDH and Saffron, as it provided the best flexibility and management controls that they needed.

Peter Cook comments, "With the current national high profile on healthy eating, it is increasingly more important that we ensure that a balanced diet is offered to our customers. Saffron's nutrition package will assist greatly in the menu planning process and, combined with the management information offered by the package, makes FDH a sound choice for partnership."

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