News

PKL Group, supplier of catering infrastructure, has developed an online calculator with support from the Children’s Food Trust to help advisors provide budget costs to schools for their entire meals service.

The calculator, which is available as a free online tool, calculates costs such as staff, utilities, ingredients and kitchen equipment and offsets these against likely income received from paid school meals, UIFSM and Free School Meal pupils.

Fully customisable for each school, the calculator allows the user to input various costs regarding a school’s current or projected meal numbers, and automatically estimates the utilities, food and staff costs associated with delivering it.

Based on the pupil numbers it also provides the cost of contract hiring the catering equipment or if needed a complete modular kitchen building required to deliver the service.

PKL was supported by the Children’s Food Trust when developing the Calculator who helped with the provision of the estimated costs of running a kitchen.