Argyll and Bute is at the forefront of putting local food on school menus and no challenge is too great. Here, Christine Boyle, Catering Officer and member of the Love British Food Schools Working Group, explains how they achieve it.
Responsibilities
I am the Catering and Cleaning Officer but I concentrate mostly on catering. My main duties are food safety, procurement of food and equipment, menu planning, sourcing ingredients, special diets and anything else in relation to the catering provision that comes up. The menu planning process takes so much into account, as well as the nutritional guidelines we have to consider special diets, Food for Life compliance which we are part of, Early Years setting the table guidance and of course cost. Menu planning is much more difficult than when I started 13 years ago. Special diets have a huge impact on our menu planning.
I absolutely love my job. It is what has kept me in Scotland!
How many schools do you provide catering services for
80 schools in Argyll and Bute. Some schools only have 2 – 3 pupils! We want to make sure that all the schools get the same service and quality. 35% of our schools are 30 and under. It can be difficult to ensure all settings are getting the same service, as supplies can sometimes be an issue for the smaller settings. It is a logistical challenge.
Facilities
We do not have a central kitchen but we are looking into having one. We have just completed a pilot of cook-freeze, with food being prepared in Park Primary in Oban, frozen and delivered to one of our smaller island schools on a weekly basis. We are hoping to role this out further to help ensure all schools are getting the same high quality meals. The plan is to use Park Primary as a central production kitchen.
We have 15 dining centres where hot food is delivered from a nearby larger school.
In addition, because of our location and logistics one of the things we do really well is how we work with other public owned facilities. e.g. On the island of Bute, we work with Thomson’s Court Care Home, a local authority care home, and they provide the food for the Partner provider Early Years settings on the island. It is great for Thomson’s too as it gives them an income. We also do this in Campbeltown where the local hospital provides Early Years meals to Partner Provider settings in the area.. And it is great for the hospital as it keeps the production kitchen going and an income. We always think out of the box!
Farming hinterland and availability of local produce
Local purchasing logistics and distribution from local producers is a big issue. We tend to look at a local area or an island, for e.g. the island of Bute and Isla where we buy our milk and beef on the islands. We don’t always manage to buy locally and sometimes have to work off national contracts. We used to buy Cambeltown cheese and delivered it to all schools but sadly that dairy has closed; it was a great income stream for them while it lasted.
Our main fruit and veg supplier is Breckenridge and they do a lot of local purchasing themselves and work with us to ensure there are promotions on items they have available.
We are restricted with our nutritional guidelines but we do as much as we can to support local. The nutritional guidelines mean that the menu is what it is and so we can’t always make changes to it. If I change something on the menu, I need to analyse its impact. We have to measure our menus daily, for example the energy value, so any small change can affect that so menu changes are not always simple to do.
When we source nationally, we absolutely prioritise British and ideally Scottish. e.g. All our red meat is assured Quality Meat Scotland. All our meat and poultry is British. But there are huge supply issues with chicken at the moment in the UK so we have to source through Brakes or Campbell Prime Meats and a small contract with Campbell’s Brothers.
How long have local supply chains been a priority?
I started in 2009 and there was a pilot on the island of Bute that had been running a couple of years. At the time all the other schools were under national contracts. There was a push from the schools and a local food group that encouraged us to source local across all our schools. I remember there was a supplier who brought a cow to a school to talk through the different cuts of meat!
In 2013 – 14, we did a lot of work to bring in more local supplies from the main islands. The main issue we faced was logistics and distribution. There is a little bit of work going on at the moment who will focus on helping local producers get into their local schools. This is in the early stages.
Logistics and distribution
There have been occasions where we have used a postman to deliver! But we now put different solutions in place to make sure the chill chain is protected. We have had weird and wonderful ways in the past! Brakes Bros. use a local distributor as a sub-contractor for the delivery of goods to many of our schools, so this is something we will be able to take advantage of as we look to procure more local produce and also to help us with the delivery of our Cook-freeze meals to the smaller schools and islands.
Budget per head
Cost per head between different schools is like night and day because of where some of our schools are. We are now trying to find solutions that we can work with local distributors to get meals to some of the far away islands. We want to provide the best possible service to all our pupils not just the ones on the mainland.
What have you achieved?
The ability to keep producing the meals and to give the service we are giving across such a variety of schools. We manage to put quality food on a plate for all the pupils even if there are logistical challenges. This is so satisfying.
Currently I am involved in a project looking at how to deliver school meals to schools on remote islands that have no service at the moment. We are looking at using a drone! We are piloting it in June to see if the drone can take the weight and ensure the temperature can be managed. During the pandemic, drones were used to deliver medical supplies to the island of Mull and this was the inspiration.
With universal school meals we need to find a solution so that every child gets a school meal.
Lessons learnt and top tips
Use your colleagues in other Local Authorities. Mingle! The ability to lift the phone and talk to other caterers about ideas and issues we may have and solutions. We work so closely with other Local Authorities. Make sure you touch base with colleagues in other authorities to get their knowledge, pick their brains. I would not be where I am and know what I know if I had not taken advantage of that.
In Scotland we are so good at sharing ideas between Local Authorities. We are really good at this. We have group emails for the menu planners in every authority and we regularly send round emails to others asking for advice, particularly on special needs menus or changes to service. The whole of Scotland is developing a recipe book at the moment so that everyone can share recipes that are compliant with the new guidelines. Collaborative working is the way forward. We will be able to amend the order codes on it so each LA can make it individual to their own schools.
Don’t take things to heart. We do a difficult job and there have been times when you just have to sit back and not take things personally.
Think outside the box with your suppliers: Think of a solution that means you can use their product and get it to where you need to get it to. Work with other areas of your LA, your procurement team, to find a solution. Sometimes we find a solution to something that is a bit out of the box but our procurement team allow us to implement it and then they put a neat box around it afterwards so that it is within the rules.
Why is Scotland so much better at this than other areas of the UK?
ASSIST being the overall group is brilliant at keeping everyone together. Most schools in Scotland have in house catering facilities run by a Catering Department within the Local Authority. The schools are managed by this department and have to follow the approved menus and stick to the purchasing that have been provided. So we have that control, but we are also a centre point of support and information and support our schools to ensure compliance. In Scotland we have 32 LAs and the majority of our schools are run by these. Within the 32 LA are the central Catering Team, and as I explained, we all speak to one another and support each other with the challenges that go along with providing a school meal service. In England, it’s different. Individual schools catering is not all is run by the LA. There are a lot of private providers in England. In England, within the LAs you also have the contracted out catering which is different.
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