News

A new co-operative has been set up to serve almost 2.5 million meals to Plymouth school children each year.

The CATERed co-operative is 49% owned by schools and 51% by the council and brings together the pooled budgets of 61 Plymouth primary schools, five special schools and one alternative complementary education service.

It currently serves more than 12,000 meals every day to children in Plymouth with 86% of the menu (attached below) made fresh from scratch every day.

The move follows the government’s decision in April 2013 to hand budgets for school meals, once held centrally by councils, to individual schools which created the situation where some schools did not have sufficient funds to be able to afford to maintain the provision and that potentially they would not be able to continue to offer hot lunches for city children.

Brad Pearce, managing director of CATERed, said: “The new co-operative formed by Plymouth schools and the Council is an innovative way of ensuring that more Plymouth children have access to high quality and nutritious school meals.

“Good school meals are hugely important both to children’s education and their health and wellbeing and CATERed is well set to build on the high standards already set by the Council’s award winning school meals service.”

CATERed is being officially launched on April 15h at Hyde Park Infants School.