Charlotte Newman is Runner-Up For The Peas Please Individual Champion Award!

Congratulations to Charlotte Newman who was runner-up for The Peas Please Individual Champion Award 2021.

The Peas Please initiative was established to drive up vegetable consumption across the UK. Peas Please is a partnership with The Food Foundation, Food Sense Wales, Nourish Scotland, Belfast Food Network and Food NI. Since the project launched 4 years ago it has delivered 162 million additional portions of vegetables into our food system working across all 4 nations.

Charlotte, Havering Catering’s nutritionist, developed top trump style posters to help promote Crunch Bunch characters from the award-winning Veggie Run App, to display in the kitchen. These included the seasonality of vegetables, fun facts, nutritional benefits, and what meals these vegetables are in on the current school menu.

She worked closely with catering staff to introduce and include more vegetables within main meals on the menu. This helped to improve the nutritional quality of their menus and encourage fussy eaters to embrace more vegetables.

In collaboration with ProVegUK, Charlotte reworded vegetarian options to appeal to meat-eaters.

Together with colleagues, she helped to put together workshops with students about healthy eating as part of the curriculum. The aim of these sessions was to introduce the students to new and exciting vegetables and their varieties.

Joining forces with colleagues in Public Health, Charlotte also encouraged schools who participated in the Healthy School London Awards, to adopt the ‘Two Vegetable Policy’.This helped to normalise consuming at least two vegetables with their hot school lunch through regular exposure and supports students to eat more vegetables and adopt healthier lifestyles.

We at HCS are extremely proud of Charlotte’s extensive contribution to the service. Her prize, a large veg box from Riverford, is well deserved.