What’s going wrong with the new school lunch programme?

Monday, 17 February 2025

The first weeks of the Government’s revamped school lunch scheme has been coloured by late deliveries, missed meals, and claims of extra costs being pushed onto schools.

Associate Education Minister David Seymour announced the revamped plan last year, saying it would save the Government $130 million annually by bringing the cost of each lunch down to $3 under a centralised system.

The new model has schools ordering food from a central source to store, prepare and distribute to 244,144 students, according to Ministry of Education data. There are 69 suppliers all-up, the most high-profile of which has been School Lunch Collective, which provides lunches to 436 schools.

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

‘Our students deserve better’: Late deliveries, missing meals

In the first few days of the new programme, with many students back at school, reports of late delivers started coming in.

Seymour apologised for delayed deliveries, citing operational issues with the kitchens that make the meals at scale.

“They produce a large number of meals, they then have to defrost them. In the first week they got some timing wrong and I understand there’s been some complaints, particularly in Rotorua,” he said.

Principal Jan Waelen, from McAuley High School in Ōtāhuhu, expressed frustration over the late deliveries. They arrived just before school ended on January 29, and the school needed to purchase food locally to feed the students.

“We had to buy 200 pies because we had no choice but to feed the girls. Meanwhile, our staff, who should be preparing lessons, are in the kitchen cooking,” deputy principal Miles Senger said.

“Our students deserve better than this.”

Auckland Girls’ Grammar School principal Ngaire Ashmore said some students received no meals at all on January 29, and the meals that did come arrived two hours late that day and the next.

On January 31, the school ordered 500 wraps on January 31 when it found out there were problems with ovens used for heating school lunches and students’ meals were expected to arrive late.

But then the lunches arrived, and the wraps too.

“It is so hard to know and trust the timing of deliveries at the moment and we don’t want our students to go hungry,” Ashmore said at the time.

Over the following days, no special meals - such as halal, vegan, or meals fitting other dietary requirements - arrived, she said.

After not turning up at all on February 3, school lunches arrived 10 minutes before the end of the next day at Sutton Park School in Auckland’s Māngere East.

Principal Vaitimu Togi Lemanu said it was not possible to deal with the meals in the time left before the end of the day.

“I said you can turn around and take your lunch back, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

The following day, enough meals arrived for Year 1 to 4 students, but there were not enough for all children in Year 5 to 8 classes, he said.

One school already considering pulling pin

Murchison Area School principal Andy Ashworth said the school was considering exiting the revamped programme, which left food waste “stinking” at school, and staff overloaded.

Instead of the lunches being distributed to classes and cleaned up by their new provider, Ashworth said he spent two hours doing that himself on the students’ first day back for the year.

The provider then didn’t collect the rubbish bags it supplied until last Monday, he said.

Murchison Area School’s lunches used to be made by a café 400 metres away, which delivered the meals in recyclable containers and picked the food waste up.

The meals were now made 800km away in Hamilton under a “School Lunch Collective” of three organisations, and shipped to a kitchen in Tapawera, Ashworth said.

While the quality of the lunches had not been as bad as feared, the logistics and the administration of the programme had been “an absolute disaster,” he said.

Extra costs pushed onto large high schools, principal says

The president of the Secondary Principals Association of New Zealand, Vaughan Couillault, said changes in the school lunch programme had pushed costs onto large high schools.

Couillault, principal of Papatoetoe High School, applauded the savings made on lunches, but said extra costs have been pushed onto high schools that need to employ extra staff to handle distributing meals once they have been delivered.

Couillault, principal of Papatoetoe High School, said high schools needed to employ extra staff to handle distributing meals once they have been delivered.

Previously, suppliers distributed lunches directly to students within schools.

“What the minister hasn’t thought about, or Cabinet hasn’t thought about, is that distribution time,” he said.

Couillault said there had not been complaints about the quality of the food, but the logistics of getting them out to students and tidying up afterwards was an extra cost that schools were “going to have to bear themselves”.

‘Halal-friendly’ meals cause concern

Principal of Papatoetoe Intermediate School in South Auckland, Pauline Cornwell, wrote to her school community on Thursday to alert them to the fact that the School Lunch Collective meals were not certified as halal.

“From the time the lunch provider was announced I have been seeking assurances that the lunches provided to our Muslim students are certified as halal,” she wrote.

“Our previous providers were required to have certification. Yesterday I had confirmation that while the meat sourced is halal the kitchens are not certified.”

Seymour defended the meals, saying the food was halal, but he did not believe the expense to go fully halal certified would not be justified.

South Auckland Muslim Association Imam Mohammed Shafeez later told Stuff if the kitchen was not certified, “they should not have used the word ‘halal’. Halal is not a brand name”.

“They shouldn’t have done that, they shouldn’t have played with our faith.”

Political furore

After Stuff reported the “halal-friendly” blunder on Friday, Labour called for Seymour to apologise, saying students had been misled, and that trust had been broken with Muslim communities.

In late January, Labour education spokesperson Jan Tinetti said instead of investing in children’s nutrition and supporting local food suppliers, the Government “chose cost-cutting ahead of quality”.

“This Government slashed school lunch funding and handed the job to a global corporation instead of supporting local suppliers—now kids are stuck with worse meals,” she said. “Their choice to prioritise cuts over proper nutrition for our kids is a disgrace.”

On Tuesday, Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick asked Prime Minister Christopher Luxon if he would eat the lunches himself.

Luxon said, “what is important is that we actually are expanding access to 10,000 more kids and the money saved is going into delivering better resources in education and healthcare”.

Luxon has long supported the lunch programme, initially set up by the previous Labour Government, and said last month he was confident the scheme would overcome its initial setbacks.