Primary - Booking Lunches - Best Practices

[CHiLL]

I'm relatively new to the primary school side of education, with my whole career experience being in secondary with cashless catering and students choosing their own meals from the menus for that day. In this primary (and I assume like most primaries), parents pay for meals cashless via School Money, where they are presented with set menus "Red" (meat), "Blue" (fish) and "Green" (veggie). There is a three week rota of daily meals, which parents book in advance. 

 

We have an issue that is two fold;

• At the start of the academic year, the person responsible for managing the bookings opened up the whole academic year to parents to book in advance
• The catering company often needs to change the meals due to stock issues et al
  • Changes to menus may also occur due to say, cultural heritage days, etc

 

I am looking at moving away from School Money and integrating everything into Bromcom, which we started using in April. I would like to know how other schools are managing meals in primaries and if anyone could share any best practices.

 

For example:

• How far in advance do you usually allow parents to book?
• How many weeks menus do you have?
  • We have 3, so 15 days worth of individual meals
  • Do you repeat the same meals every week, or 10 days, etc?
• How are you presenting menu options to parents?
  • Do you list all individual meal types for the whole three week rota?
  • Do you just list "Red", "Blue", "Green" on the app and refer parents to the school website that can be updated as needed?
• How are you managing communication to parents when it comes to unexpected menu changes due to stock issues?
• How are you managing existing booked meals that are no longer available when it comes to unexpected menu changes due to stock issues?

 

 

[Synkrox]

We are all-through SEND (age 4-19) - we use Bromcom for dinners and dinner payments
We have the proper meals listed on a 3 week cycle rather than colour codes.

We make menus available for a full term and try to make sure it's on for preordering a couple of weeks prior to the preceding term ending.

 

As well as parent pre-ordering, which is allowed up to the night before service, we also do classroom preordering with the AM registration (which is just legacy, if we started again we would try to push it to parent preorder fully)

 

Ensure all dietary info is inputted into Bromcom, then the daily meal reports will give the kitchen all the info class by class to ensure safe food service.

 

Our chef or their deputy takes responsibility for service, if something is not available or has been substituted then he will manage it. This is rare and doesn't normally involve contacting parents. It's normally an issue with a particular ingredient that may be contained in a different brand of food - baked beans is the one that springs to mind as having wildly different recipes. This is why it's so important to give the kitchen all the dietary info every day for service.
Perhaps we are hyper-aware as we have children that can't manage an unblended pea getting in their dinner as they'd choke.

 

Stock should be ordered in good time and shortages mitigated but this shouldn't be a "you" problem. If the kitchen want to sit and call each parent to ask if little johnny wants chips or wedges then thats up to them 😂 - our meals are set price so if they have dinner, they get the dinner charge.

 

While you can override a menu for a particular day, it's really designed for "xmas dinner day" and the like - not adhoc daily changes. It won't allow moving parents orders to the new menu or alternatives.

 

[DavR]

Obviously this is going to depend on how your catering company works, but, we don't do meal choices in advance at all. We offer a meat and veggie option daily, with a backup of jacket potato and salad bar available every day. The kitchens know how many veggies they need to cater for, but also make enough extra for those that choose the veggie option on the day.

 

Meals are simplified here because we're in London, and are funded to give free meals in Infants and Juniors, but even when we charged for dinners, we didn't take meal choices in advance, it's always been choose on the day.