Wattie’s frozen meal fish pie one of the worst school lunches of the year, principal says
Friday, 28 February 2025
A photo taken near a school lunch kitchen shows what students at some Gisborne schools were having on Thursday.
Stuff was sent the photo, taken near Gisborne Hospital, on Thursday morning.
A Compass staff member told the member of the public, who asked not to be named, that the meals were being used for school lunches, but they emphasised it was only a short-term arrangement.
The photo shows perhaps hundreds of boxes left over from Wattie’s frozen meal fish pie meals that were served up on Thursday.
Jonathan Poole, the principal of Illminster Intermediate School in Inner Kaiti, confirmed their lunches were provided by Compass Group and that fish pie had been Thursday’s meal.
Poole, speaking to Stuff on Friday, said the fish pie meal was probably one of the worst days that the school has had with respect to food waste and the kids not eating lunch.
His feedback from students was that “they were put off by the smell of it and the look of it.”
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Poole questioned the cost of the lunches in the new programme and was concerned they didn’t contain enough nutrients. The Wattie’s frozen meal fish pie is currently on special at Woolworths for $3.80.
“Looking at yesterday’s meal, is it actually serving the purpose that it’s supposed to serve, which was Mr Seymour’s idea around being more cost-effective but still providing a nutritious meal,” Poole asked.
“We’re grateful to be getting lunches to feed our kids, but it seems to be a bit of a mixed bag, to be honest,” he said, referring to recurring issues in the lunch programme.
Currently, 69 suppliers provide school lunches in addition to schools where lunches are made on site. The biggest suppliers are Compass Group NZ and Libelle Group, which form part of The School Lunch Collective.
A spokesperson for the School Lunch Collective said there was a CPK (central production kitchen) in Gisborne and confirmed the fish pies were served on Thursday.
Wattie’s has been a listed supplier/partner since the beginning of the new lunch programme, they said.
“We are partnering with a range of suppliers to ensure students receive lunch every school day.”
Associate Education Minister David Seymour defended the School Lunch Collective. He said it is partnering with a range of food suppliers to make sure students receive lunch every school day.
He also defended the fish pie:
“Wattie’s, which has been filling Kiwi stomachs since 1934, is one of them. Their fish pie, complemented with an additional food item meets the nutritional standards of the programme, and of Kiwis all over the country.”
On Thursday, the Principals’ Federation (NZPF) called for a return to the previous school lunches system with local funding, saying the new cost-saving system pushed Seymour had resulted in a “huge increase in wastage”.
In a letter to Seymour, NZPF president Leanne Otene said the “global company” brought in to provide the lunches “has not delivered on your expectations, nor on ours”.
“That time has now come,” Otene said. “NZPF now asks you to cancel the current contract and fund schools to deliver school lunches locally.”
In response to Stuff’s question about wastage and after being sent a photo of the Wattie’s fish pie packaging in the bin, Seymour said:
“As is the programme's policy, the packaging from the Wattie’s fish pie meals will be recycled. Based on the data received from the Gisborne production kitchen, there was on average 5.02% of food surplus from schools this week.”
Talking to reporters in Invercargill on Thursday, Seymour said some principals were behaving in a way that was basically teaching people to be ungrateful.
“I had one principal complaining that they got 11 meals of free butter chicken. Well, there’s a lot of people in the world that if you said, ‘how would you like 11 free butter chickens’, their response wouldn’t be a complaint,” Seymour said.
He also defended the quality of the meals, which has been part of the ongoing criticism.
“Many children are writing in and saying ‘we think these meals are better than we had last year”.
“We have embraced commercial expertise, used government buying power, and generated supply chain efficiencies to realise over $130m of annual cost savings”, Seymour said.