School holidays are upon us (again?!) and as we contemplate feeding our children three times a day (and the rest) we spare a thought for the millions of families who struggle at half term without the security of school meals.
As leaders in the UK food manufacturing industry, we do everything we can to support children and families with healthy and tasty food. Quattro Foods has been supplying the education sector for many years with delicious and nutritious food products and with health and budget more important than ever in our post-Covid world, we continue to work on manufacturing hearty and tasty meals for schools across the country. Dinner ladies have been the unsung heroes of the Covid crisis, in our opinion. We know how hard catering teams work to feed our children and we aim to relieve the pressure in busy school kitchens by doing the lion’s share of the peeling, chopping and stewing. We are feeding the next generation of leaders, after all. If their brains aren’t nourished, we’re all in trouble!
At Quattro Foods our contribution is to offer a helping hand to school catering staff who served lunch tirelessly throughout the pandemic, including during the school holidays – thanks to Marcus Rashford. Many kids were home-schooled, but there were thousands of vulnerable children and kids of keyworkers who continued to go to school, and were fed daily by dedicated staff.
It gives us enormous pleasure to see celebrities not only getting on board with the cause, but leading the way in the fight to end child hunger in the UK.
Covid-hero Marcus Rashford started a high-profile campaign last year over lockdown. He has been lobbying hard for a ‘meal a day’ for all school pupils in need, which is part of a bigger and extremely ambitious plan to end child food poverty in England. The football star has made incredible inroads. Two of his original demands have been met so far – the provision of meals and activities to low-income families during school holidays and the expansion of the healthy start voucher scheme. He is now calling for a full-scale review of the free school meals system and is lobbying the government to lower the threshold for free school meals eligibility to bring the benefit to a further 1.7 million children. He’s not alone in his mission. The Child Poverty Action Group has estimated that two in five children living below the poverty line are not entitled to free school meals and a host of other charities and organisations are also working hard and standing behind him.
Marcus Rashford’s extraordinary campaigning work is an inspiration to us all. We continue to innovate with fresh locally sourced ingredients to bring delicious and nutritious lunches to students at schools and colleges across the UK.
Call on Quattro for healthy budget meals for schools. We serve the education sector, hopeful for a generation of well-fed and nurtured bodies and minds to lead us into whatever the world has in store for us next!