Quality school meals at low cost

Smart ways for meeting margins

By Stewart Mcluskey, executive director - education, Civica

How can we deliver healthy, nutritious meals for children and teenagers against rising costs and legislative pressures? It’s a familiar story among schools, academy trusts and contract caterers, and one that doesn’t seem to be getting any easier. In fact, you might say that the challenges to deliver on this promise are even multiplying.

While there is no silver bullet, contract caterers are always looking for innovative ways to build greater financial resilience against the macro threats that can be damaging to margins but are often unavoidable.

Here we will look at some of the ways in which technology is proving to be a useful ally. This can be through enabling more effective cost management, helping to optimise processes for easy compliance and tracking, or streamlining services to deliver a better user experience.

Rising costs and stretched budgets

Analysis from the School Cuts coalition says that 94% of secondary schools and 76% of primaries were not going to meet rising costs in 2025/26. The National Education Union adds to this that schools’ costs for 2025/26 will rise by 3.4% while mainstream school funding will only increase by 2.2%. There is no escaping that overall budgets will remain stretched.

For contract caterers, there is a whole other set of financial pressures to try and work around. Increases in operating and production costs continue to get passed down through the global food supply chain. In fact, LACA, the school food people, suggest that food prices have increased by an eye-watering 50.34% since 2020. Rising taxes are also hitting the industry. Increases in national insurance contributions, for example, are often having to be absorbed rather than passed onto customers.

Against all this, there is still an essential job to fill hungry tummies and fuel young brains with nutritious meals. While it sometimes might feel like the one thing that is guaranteed to get eaten are the profit margins, catering industry leaders are combatting the challenging landscape by enhancing their operational agility through digital transformation.

Cost management – when the price of fish matters

Food prices have been particularly unstable in recent years. The supply chain has needed to respond to everything from Brexit to the pandemic to international conflicts, which in simple terms means that costs go up. These events are not always possible to plan for, but they usually have an impact on bottom lines. So, how can they be mitigated from a cost management point of view?

While schools need to work within strict parameters and fixed budgets, their catering partners have had to be clever in finding ways to introduce new efficiencies that will offset any cost rises so that they can continue to deliver value to schools.

Success has depended on developing greater agility to be able to respond quickly to external pressures with minimal disruption to services. To achieve this, software solutions are increasingly playing a role in joining up processes, automating key actions and providing pinpoint insights that help to keep ahead of the game with cost control strategies.

Greater flexibility to adapt menus plans

A key battleground is in caterers’ ability to alter recipes or menus and then roll them out in a consistent and frictionless way. If there are changes in the price or availability of ingredients, for example, caterers need to be able to quickly pivot to an alternative supply, adapt their meal plans, update the key information and then push it out across their portfolio.

The same approach applies if nutritional or allergen information needs to be updated, or new regulations come into play. And then there are the planned activities such as when meal cycles change from term to term, or if menus are being proactively evolved to capture new dietary trends.

Part of the agility in managing these situations efficiently is about being able to move fast to keep school meal production running without delays. It is also about being able to work with suppliers, partners and customers in a flexible way so that you can cope with changes from one day to the next. This is now easier than ever because it can all be managed in the cloud via a digital catering management system.

Cloud-based catering management

The traditional excel spreadsheet approach is no longer effective in a competitive marketplace. Instead, key data points around ingredients, stocks and availability, allergens, meal plans, costs, timelines, compliancy, free school meal requirements, customer service agreements and process management information all need to be centralised and accessible to decision makers.

A catering management system will live alongside operations and provide full visibility of the end-to-end interdependencies of school meal production, from ingredient cataloguing to meal engineering, to production and roll out. It will be fed by the most up to date information available to provide a 360-degree dashboard view of operations across an entire portfolio. By controlling this centrally, data only needs to be input once, and by setting up effective rules and parameters for the data, compliance and cost control can be monitored closer than ever.

A digitised catering management system provides caterers with all the information they need to monitor operations and make fast, informed decisions. Caterers now have the ability to schedule updates ahead of time and roll them out automatically. They can also monitor key performance indicators around waste reduction, food miles and CO2 emissions to make sure that they are on track with their sustainability responsibilities.

The data will provide insights to better understand what’s working well, what are the possible challenges coming down the tracks and where the stress points are so that corrective action can be taken. It’s all about joining up the information so that decisions to improve performance and reduce costs can be made much quicker.

Supporting schools

Delivering well-balanced, nutritious meals that are compliant with government standards and within budget is the way that caterers are supporting schools in providing an environment where students have the best chance of high attainment. Taking a centralised, digital approach is the best way for caterers to maximise their opportunity.

Find out more information on how Civica can help deliver agile catering management for schools and multi-academy trusts here.