The numbers behind the revamped school lunch scheme

Monday, 10 February 2025

A vegetarian lunch delivered to Papatoetoe High School on Friday February 7 contained a few chickpeas.

A revamped school lunch scheme started with late lunches and missed meals as students returned to schools over the past two weeks.

Here’s what we know about the numbers behind massive changes to the programme:

244,144

According to Ministry of Education data from January 27 this year, 244,144 students and 1014 schools are in Ka Ora Ka Ako, the Healthy School Lunches programme.

Chicken curry was on the menu at 436 schools suppled by The School Lunch Collective last Friday.

The Ministry uses its Equity Index to work out which schools are included in the programme, with the aim of reaching the 25% of students most in need of support.

69

All up, there are 69 suppliers providing school lunches across the country, and that’s in addition to the schools where lunches are made on-site. The biggest suppliers are Compass Group NZ (owned by global food contractor Compass Group PLC) and Libelle Group, both are part of The School Lunch Collective, which was announced in October as the winner of a contract to provide low-price school lunches.

One

According to a spokesperson for The School Lunch Collective, all its regular meals are prepared and cooked in one production kitchen in Hamilton. From there, the frozen lunches go to 22 kitchens around the country to be thawed, heated and then delivered to schools.

How is the school lunch programme going at your school? Send photos to newstips@stuff.co.nz

127,000

Roughly how many school lunches are being delivered every school day by The School Lunch Collective. At $3 a pop, that’s a cost of $1.9 million/week. That’s just over half the lunches delivered to schools in the programme.

Five

Students at Auckland Girls’ Grammar School had a choice of wraps or hot curry when delivery problems had school staff scrambling to ensure there was food on the table on Friday January 31.

There are five different school lunch programmes in place. The most high profile lately is The School Lunch Collective’s two-year contract to provide lunch to students at intermediate and high schools, primary schools with students up to Year 8, and composite schools with students from Year 0 to 15. This is called the alternate model and covers 436 schools.

Primary schools with students from Year 0 to 6 can continue with their existing external suppliers in 2025 (204 schools), but from 2026, they will move to the alternate model.

Lunches are made internally at 270 schools with their own kitchen, while 61 schools have an iwi/hapū model for lunch supply. Teen parent units and specialist schools (39 in total) have their own model to cater for students with complex special dietary needs.

A school lunch delivered to Waverley Primary School on Thursday January 30.

$3 to $8.90

This is where it gets confusing as the price of lunch varies across the models. Anyone who’s been following the school lunch issue will be aware that The School Lunch Collective’s price of $3/meal is the cheapest model.

Not operating at the same scale, internal and iwi/hapū model schools are funded $4 per meal. While primary schools with Years 0 to 6, specialist schools and teen parent units receive $5.97 to $8.90 per lunch, the same as in term 4 last year.

According to the Ministry of Education, schools choose whether to go with internally or externally supplied meals, or work with iwi/hapū meal provider, and most schools have stuck with the model they were on in term 4, 2024.

$130 million

That’s how much less the new scheme is costing the government annually, with the new model cutting $5.50 from the price of each lunch.

4000

From April the programme will expand to include around 4000 two to 5-year-olds at low-equity, community-based early learning centres, with more centres joining every six weeks until the scheme includes 10,000 preschoolers.