This month , HES Catering in partnership with suppliers McCain’s and Heinz have offered Havering primary schools the opportunity to take part in a produce growing project called ‘Farm to Fork’.

The aim of the project is to help enrich school curriculums. The project helps to improve food knowledge, gives students a better understanding of where food comes from and how it’s utilised, all whilst enjoying the great outdoors.

Schools are supplied with resources and tools in order to grow their own produce. Once the schools harvest their produce, our Nutritionist & Development Chef can work with the students to create healthy & delicious recipes to cook and enjoy.

This is the first year the project has been launched and 19 schools across the borough are currently participating. All 19 schools were automatically entered into a prize draw to win the ‘Innocent Smoothies – Big Grow’ vegetable seed packs. These packs include the following:

• 5 Large backs of seeds (varieties can vary)
• Compost discs and cups for growing
• Teachers resources packs
• Star grower badge.

The ‘Innocent-Big Grow’ project aims to help students learn something about food empathy. This allows the students to have a deeper understanding of where their food comes from as well as promoting local and seasonal produce.

Watch this space for more updates on their progress and the delicious recipes created…

Whilst developing our new upcoming menus, as a service we have been working with ProVeg UK over the last year intending to increase the amount of plant-based and vegetarian dishes on the menu, as well as trying to make them more attractive to our young customer to overcoming the reducing of meat-based dishes.

“It has been a fantastic experience working with Charlotte and the dedicated team at HES Catering Services. From the onset, their progressive stance on building more sustainable menus, both for health and environmental reasons, has allowed us to work together on small changes and tweaks to their school menus to help increase the uptake of veggie and plant-based dishes, and work to reduce the reliance on meat across the menus – without impacting on choice or taste!

Initial results have been positive, and together we’re looking forward to building on our existing work as part of the Public Sector Catering 20% Less Meat pledge!”

Phil Mansbridge- Executive Director ProVeg UK

With the help of ProVeg UK, some of the changes we have made to our primary menu include:

• Adding an extra meat-free day a week on the menu.
• Adjusting the wording on our menu to ensure we do not suggest meat-free meals are inferior to other options.
• Include a Vegan option on the menu daily.

Our reasoning for these changes further to those we have already adopted such as supporting local suppliers to help our community as well as reduce our carbon footprint are:

• Help our customers establish healthy eating behaviours- help to increase the amount of fruit and vegetable in their diets.
• Ensure that our menu is even more sustainable.
• Helping the environment.
• To provide meals that are equally as delicious.

#20percentlessmeat @HCS_LBH @ProVeg_UK