Nutritious, delicious and sustainable meals for children

The new school term brings with it a multitude of considerations, especially given the current pandemic and various anxieties around safety and wellbeing of both staff and pupils. The challenges that many schools face within their catering departments are ensuring that nutritious, sustainable and quality-assured meals can still be delivered in a way which is safe, cost-effective and compliant with the new ways of working.

Important factors, such as working with partners with ethical supply chains, as well as a commitment to sustainability – including responsible sourcing – cannot be ignored. That’s why here at apetito, we take the issue of where our ingredients come from very seriously.

One hundred per cent of our wild fish is MSC-certified, indicating a fishery meets international best practice for sustainable fishing, and all our beef is supplied by British and Irish farmers.

We have over 60 years’ experience working with our catering partners to deliver simple, stress-free meals, as well as plenty of choice and variety with over 100 main meals and 50 desserts in our Queen’s Award-winning ranges.

All our meals can be easily cooked from frozen by schools’ own catering teams.

No waste, minimum storage requirements, lower overheads, no concerns around food safety and easy ordering to suit the needs of every school’s catering team.

Balanced nutritional content plays a vital role

All of our meals are developed in-house by our expert chefs in full consultation with our registered dietitian to ensure the appropriate nutritional content is considered and implemented before any of our meals are produced.

Getting the balance right is crucial, especially when it comes to young children, and the known impact that nutrition can have on their performance throughout the long school day.

Everything that we do is designed to give reassurance to headteachers and parents that meals served in school dining rooms are safe, giving them the confidence that pupils are enjoying nutritionally balanced menu solutions that can transform mealtimes.

As a fast-growing provider of meals within the independent schools’ sector, apetito has recently partnered with both IAPS (Independent Association of Prep Schools) and ISA (Independent Schools Association) to raise awareness of its award-winning meals to schools

Meeting bespoke dietary needs

One of the biggest concerns for schools when catering for pupils is how they guarantee safety in the provision of menus for pupils who have ‘free-from’ requirements.

Schools can choose from our extensive collection of meals that are ‘free-from’ all of the 14 known allergens, and we also operate a strict allergen control and simple ordering system, which has been specifically designed to give total confidence in what children are consuming at mealtimes.

This fail-safe system enables allergens to be identified at the point of ordering, giving additional reassurance to our partners.

Why not challenge us to save you time and money?

Saving time and money are both key priorities for our customers, especially when it comes to managing busy kitchen environments alongside concerns as to new ways of working as schools open for business again.

They don’t want to – nor should they have to – compromise on quality, especially when it comes to the dining experience for their pupils and teachers. And schools want to make sure that there is no question of meal shortages alongside the Covid-19 pandemic.

Essentially, we assist our partners in delivering tasty and nutritious mealtimes for pupils but in a way that is easy, stress-free and straightforward to manage.

If you are looking at potentially changing how you ensure safe and value-driven mealtimes, please do challenge us to save you time and money with absolutely no compromise on the quality of your meals provision.

What are apetito’s environmental credentials?

Taking our ethics and sustainability pledges extremely seriously, apetito is a strong supporter of the British food and farming industry, and we are wholly committed to sourcing ingredients from suppliers who share our commitment to improving the world we live in.

This commitment extends to everything we do, from our passion for the environment to our partnership approach with suppliers and customers, and the investment we commit to our people company-wide.
It extends to waste and our determination to reduce single-use plastics across our supply chain. We all need to ‘make a difference’ and we take our responsibility very seriously.

We’re also founding members of the UK Plastics Pact, an initiative which brings together several of the UK’s leading brands to tackle the plastic challenge, and are committed to hitting ambitious targets by 2025, including 100% of plastic packaging to be reusable, recyclable or compostable.

As members of the Ethical Trading Initiative, we understand that sustainability and responsible sourcing is a worldwide issue, so we’re taking action to do our part.

Pioneering initiatives are driving fast-paced, fresh approaches

If someone told me a year ago we would be developing around 40 new meals in less than 49 days, I would have said, impossible!

apetito is a company committed to driving change and innovation, so we decided to take a fresh approach to how we develop and implement our meals by partnering with a selection of leading chefs across the South West.

We recruited eight chefs whose businesses had to temporarily close due to the pandemic and supported local talent – which included MasterChef quarter finalist Jethro Lawrence – by inviting them to create a variety of dishes for our partners across the UK.

This resulted in six new meals, completed in just 49 days from concept to production, to form our Culinary Inspirations collection. The chefs worked alongside our in-house award-winning chefs and dietitian to ensure the highest levels of nutritional content were implemented. We launched these dishes to our independent school customers in early August ready for the term ahead, as the first in an ongoing series within our Culinary Inspirations collection.

These new dishes include delicious options such as chicken and chorizo paella and the classic coronation chicken, as well as a chicken and sweetcorn bake, which is set to be a sure-fire winner with pupils!

Coming up is our new pasta range, followed by some inspirational additions to our plant-based lineup of dishes, which we believe will be welcomed by schools.

As with all our meals, Culinary Inspirations represent fantastic value, and all dishes can be easily cooked from frozen on site by schools’ own teams.

An invitation to independent schools from apetito:

Challenge us to save you time and money – whilst offering you reassurance that you’re serving food that will fuel and nourish the young minds in your school. We’d love to discuss how we can help you deliver simple, stress-free catering within your school. To find out how we can support you, please visit www.apetito.co.uk/schools