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Steve Logan, Quality Assurance Officer for the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, has an extremely responsible job, helping to ensure hot, healthy and nutritionally balanced menus for the 110 schools in the borough – not an easy task!
Steve, along with his colleagues in the Children’s Services Contract Services the award winning in-house catering team, pride themselves on providing the highest standards of service to schools in the borough, with a selection of homemade products and recognised meals that provide choice and variety to suit all tastes. All the school menus comply with, and usually exceed, the Government's National Nutritional Standards for school lunches.
The new government guidelines and media attention provoked a real focus on Steve and his colleagues to analyse the nutritional content of all their menus and come up with a dishes that met the guidelines and also were attractive to the students. Steve spoke about the reaction to the revised menus: “We have not drastically changed our menus but we have created healthier home cooked versions of much loved dishes, such as fish and chips or pizza, by having steamed fish and healthy chips and pizza with a wholemeal base.
“It was vital not to change the perception of our school dinners to the extreme and risk students not having a hot meal each day – we have not had any negative feedback so far and the students really liked the Natures Goodness chips from Farm Frites. The students have a choice of 3 main dishes each day meat, fish and vegetarian, all served with vegetables.”
Steve discusses the reasons why he felt Farm Frites was currently the best supplier of chips for the borough said: “We have chips and potato wedges on the menu once a week and following extensive research with our cooks in the borough the overall reason for choosing Natures Goodness chips is the taste; they had a great flavour, crisp on the outside, fluffy inside and they cooked well.
“We advise all our schools to bake chips in the oven if possible, however our own research showed that even when we fried the product it was still less than 5% fat and it was obvious in the trials we did, before stocking the brand, that when the chips were lifted out of the fryers there was no fat residue.
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- 14 - 17 January, 2009
BETT 2009 - UK
