Local Food Links gets Gold award
Local Food Links is the first caterer in the country to achieve the Food for Life Gold Mark. The caterer actually exceeds the Food for Life Catering Gold Mark criteria by serving 100% freshly prepared, 58.6% locally sourced ingredients and 42% organic ingredients.
Read the interview below with Tim Crabtree (TC) from Local Food Links to find out more.
Why did you decide to go for the Food for Life Catering Mark?
TC: Local food Links was created because the schools we work with decided to opt up of a central contract which would have provided them with ready-meals made in Nottingham and then trucked down 212 miles to Bridport in Dorset to be reheated - there would be no local or organic ingredients in these meals.
We have always tried to provide the best possible food for the schools we work with and we see the Food for Life Catering mark as the gold standard for school catering. Therefore we felt we should make sure we brought everything up to that gold mark standard.
Right from the start we wanted to work with the schools to design a school meals service, which had the very best ingredients and a good proportion of local and organic ingredients, so for us the Food for Life Catering Mark was a logical fit for us.
Where do you source your local and organic ingredients? Do you work with any interesting suppliers?
TC: Many of our suppliers are cooperatives. So for example, we use Somerset Organic Link (a marketing coop of field scale organic growers) and we’re quite a good fit for them because they have the volume we need and we can help them when they have a glut of something. There is also a meat-cooperative in Dorset, we have been fortunate to work with, and a workers co-op, Essential Trading, which supplies dried goods such as pulses, grains and herbs.
Have you faced any challenges?
TC: Yes, there have been challenges. With regards to suppliers it is partly an issue about getting consistent suppliers that can supply the kind of volumes you require. The second thing is, can you get the quality of food you’re looking for at a good price? We have been involved in the development of the local food sector for many years now. Ten years ago we set up the first farmers markets in Dorset and that whole movement has been really useful to many small producers. Then there are the wholesale suppliers, but there is a bit of a gap in the market in the medium-scale capacity suppliers, which we use.
We have had to really work with our producers and suppliers over the last two or three years, but it has paid off.
We started as a pilot project just producing soup one day a week and now three years on, we are producing 3,000 meals per week and that is going to continue to rise. We are about to open a new kitchen in North Dorset, in partnership with 8 primary schools, and expect to produce a further 2500 meals per day.
We have been fortunate to have some funding support from a range of sources, and this means we have had the time to look out for suppliers who can meet our requirements. We have been able to develop really close relationships with our suppliers, but clearly this is an issue for caterers who haven’t had that time. They’ll therefore just ring a food service company that will deliver them everything. We recognise we have been lucky.
We do aim to be operating without grants within the next two years by operating at a bigger scale than we originally envisaged. We are for example exploring diversifying into working with old people’s organisations such as care homes, day centres and lunch clubs to provide meals – this will increase the scale of the operation so that the overhead costs can be covered.
We sell our school meals at £1.80-£2 and the margin on that really is tiny, so it is a challenge making it work financially if we were just to make school meals.
However, it is also worth saying that there has been this trend over the last 30 years of contracting out catering in schools to private providers, who are seeking a 40% profit on school food and if you set up a not-for-profit service that is not extracting that profit, then all of that can be re-directed into better quality ingredients. We just can’t get away from the fact that if you are trying to make too much money out of the meals then the quality of the ingredients will suffer and one of the main reasons we have been able to use these very high quality ingredients is because we’re not taking a profit out of the system.
Do you and your team enjoy cooking with seasonal, local and organic ingredients?
TC: Definitely. I think for all the staff we have in the kitchen one of the big draws of working with us was the fact that they would be using the best, fresh ingredients. Many if them have been working in other schools where the quality of ingredients have been appalling with frozen this and pre-prepared that. So the quality of the ingredients and cooking from scratch were big incentives for working with Local Food Links. It’s interesting -- we have just recruited a new kitchen team to work with the North Dorset schools. Again, for them – they have come from big companies like Scholarest – it was a big draw to be using proper ingredients again and to be cooking decent meals. That’s why they wanted to come and work with us.
Have you had a good response from parents, schools and children?
TC: Well, we have always been able to contrast what we could offer with the ready meals from Nottingham with the provenance of the ingredients in those meals being completely unclear. So I think that from the start people have been really pleased that we’ve taken a different approach. But the nice thing about getting the Gold mark is that it is a good reminder of what we do -- to be able to say to the schools and parents, two years in, that we’ve got this significant mark and it’s quite an achievement. The feedback from the parents was that the kids were really proud that their school meals got this award, which is really nice.
What have been the main benefits of your ‘Food for Life work’?
TC: We have asked all the schools we work with to sign up to the Food for Life Partnership Mark and that means that when they go through that process and have to look at the catering side of the Mark it allows the stakeholders in the schools to understand better about the quality of the food that is being produced and served at the school.
The whole Food for Life Partnership programme is very supportive of what we’re doing as it puts food into a broader context and allows people to get a better understanding of the food that is being produced.
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If you would like to learn more about the Food for Life Partnership or have any questions, please contact us.