Ms Angela Ruttledge:

In relation to the school meals, we were involved in a programme called the community sustainable village programme in a primary school in Cabra and one of the issues on sustainability that immediately struck the children in the classroom was on food waste and packaging of school meals in particular. Other people who were working on that project went ahead and supported the primary school children in doing an audit of food waste in the school and the results were quite staggering. While we absolutely support the objectives of the school meals programme around better nutrition - in fact part of the inspiration for the establishment of FoodCloud was Iseult Ward, the cofounder of the organisation, growing up and seeing the benefit of having a breakfast club in a school in Ballymun - we need to roll out the system in a way that does not embed problems around food waste. When they did the report, there were suggestions around things like flexibility in the system for ordering food, portion sizes, the ability to change from hot meals to cold meals from winter to summer and so on that could really help the programme to be more sustainable as it is rolled out and scaled up.