Councillor Sheila Place said: “This prestigious award is a great source of pride for us. We’re absolutely delighted because it supports what we’ve been practising for years – delivering tasty, healthy, locally sourced food and teaching children the importance of good quality ingredients.
“The Gold Standard also recognises our efforts to buy organic and serve fresh food rather than frozen meals – an approach which always gets the thumbs up from our greatest critics, the children. We are also big on using seasonal vegetables and fruit, so you won’t see any strawberries used in the winter or parsnips in summer.”
Donna Baines, who is responsible for developing school meal menus at the Council, explained: “For every new menu we always search high and low across our region for the very best quality products to make exciting meals.
“And we allow our chefs to take ownership of the menus and have the flexibility to tweak dishes to suit their customers by using the same ingredients in a different way. So if their children don’t like hot pot, for example, they could make a cottage pie instead.”
“This is a fantastic achievement! Serving Gold Standard school meals not only ensures high quality, fresh, nutritious, seasonal food is served to pupils, it also supports higher welfare systems such as organic and free range, benefits the local community through using local produce, and ensures that environmentally-sustainable produce is used,” added Clare McDermott, the Soil Association’s business development director.
“Nottinghamshire is proving that it is possible to serve good quality sustainable food at scale – and I hope to see others following its lead.”
And out of nearly 200 Notts schools which answered the County Council’s latest survey about school meals, over 80% said they were satisfied with school lunches.
Pupils themselves rated catering staff highly with nearly 90% saying they were satisfied with the presentation and quality of food served up at lunchtimes.