The Constellation Trust includes primary, secondary and an alternative provision school working together to provide the best learning opportunities for the pupils. Each school serves its own community and has its own unique identity. Together everyone benefits from working in partnership, can share good practice and have a joint central service support team.
The catering is produced in house and providing a wide selection of healthy choices for pupils is of paramount importance. The Constellation Trust prides itself on the food served and the selection we offered to pupils on a daily basis.
The Challenge
The schools within The Constellation Trust had been experiencing a high volume of allergen and nutritional enquiries over recent years. The existing, manual systems simply didn’t work. More and more requests were being received relating to ‘food intolerances’ as well as allergens and increasing cases in conditions such as diabetes were resulting in a rise in nutritional information requests.
‘Our manual processes were time consuming and put us at risk of human error. It became clear we would need to digitise our data in order to protect it and our pupils. We were looking for a system that managed the whole process of identifying allergens and nutrition from ingredients through to the menu and really importantly, one which would safeguard our pupils’.
The Solution
The Constellation Trust began to use Kafoodle as their recipe and menu management software in order to store all data in one place and ensure consistency across the Trust. The ingredients data was able to be taken straight from primary supplier Turner Price and added directly into the software. This allowed all the relevant information required to keep allergen and nutritional data accurate.
Recipes were standardised ensuring food information available to pupils and parents was consistent as well as reinforcing the quality of the dishes being produced for all sites. The Constellation Trust began using Meal Planning to look at menu cycles in one place, giving the ability to review nutritional content of the menu selections and costs as the menus evolved. Being able to make changes and tweaks easily to meal plans based on the data from the recipes is something that simply couldn't be achieved externally to Kafoodle.
The Constellation Trust then decided to utilise Kafoodle’s interactive, digital menus functionality to enable pupils and parents / guardians the ability to preview the menus in a live environment and filter them according to requirements. This allowed visual calorie labelling and allergens as well as the ability to exclude any ingredient that might cause a child an adverse reaction.
Kafoodle have also since developed a carbohydrate report based on meals available, which can be used to specifically review diabetic pupils' intake in order to help work out insulin required.
The Result
• Catering Managers can request to add (school compliant) items to menus and the Catering Head Office can check costs and portion sizes in seconds.
• The schools regularly receive requests for the nutritional content of foods especially for pupils who have diabetes or parents who ‘positively’ challenge our healthy meal options. This information is now at our fingertips and consistent across our schools.
• Pupils and parents can visit each school website and preview the menus. They can filter these menus for themselves and be sure that there is always something suitable for them to eat.
• Updating the meal plans and menus is quick and simple to do and changes are reflected immediately in the online menus.
"Every Head of School, support staff, catering staff and our Trust Operation Teams think Kafoodle is fantastic. They really like the design of the menus and how this links in with safeguarding our pupils. To the extent that the title of my presentation to introduce the system was 'Safeguarding and Kafoodle’. Having Kafoodle in place ensures that we can use this system as a form of due diligence and ensures catering budgets are being managed correctly." - James Pickering, Head of Catering Services ,Constellation Trust.
“The customer service from Kafoodle has been excellent with training and support being an ongoing journey as we continue to work together. I have removed all other methods of recording expenditure and managing allergens. i.e. if it’s not on Kafoodle, it’s not on the menu!”
To find out how Kafoodle can help your school or education trust in - or indeed any other sector - manage your recipes and menus for person-centric ordering, Contact Us.