"Pride have a refreshing approach which ensures their customers get the best food and service”. Nick Tuck, Care Director for Independent Age
“We have been delighted” Andy Thomson, AON Ltd.
“Another benefit, apart from well fed and happy children, is the increase in free school meals… [for which] the school will receive additional funding.” Barbara Chevis, Headteacher, Burlington Primary School.
Pride Catering targets Food for Life Gold
14th June 2010
Pride Catering, the Guildford-based specialist catering contractor, has been awarded the Soil Association’s Food for Life Silver Catering Mark for its work at St Stephens School in Twickenham, which is also one of Food for Life’s Flagship schools. Not resting on its laurels, Pride has immediately embarked on raising its Catering Mark status to Gold level.
It has been a real team effort to achieve the Silver award and Deborah Kenny, Senior Operations Manager for Pride played a key role in finding and vetting appropriate food suppliers for St. Stephen’s. Kenny explained, “We won the award thanks to our high food quality standards and commitment to traceability and provenance - for example, we only use free-range chicken and eggs; all our fruit, vegetables and milk are organic, and we definitely don’t use undesirables like GM ingredients, E-numbers and hydrogenated fats! All the meat is either free-range or locally sourced Red Tractor standard - our free range chicken has been sourced from a farm in Godstone in Surrey, our pork comes from Sussex, and our beef is from Hampshire. We’re only using MSC-certified sustainable seafood too.”
Katrina Kellegaeva of the Soil Association commented, ‘For Pride, ‘not possible’ was just not an answer they were prepared to give when faced with the challenge of sourcing suitable local and organic products for the school. We’re very much looking forward to working with the Pride team on achieving Gold for St Stephens, and getting more of Pride's schools to be part of Food for Life.”
Tim Price, one of the Partners at Pride Catering said, “Pride has a strong ‘freshly-prepared-food’ ethos and having worked with the Food for Life Partnership for many years, we actively encourage our schools to be involved with the Food for Life Schools programme. When it came to working for Catering Mark status, and with St Stephens being a flagship school, it was an ideal route for us to prove our food credentials.”
Pride serves over 200 lunches a day at St Stephens and according to Caroline Ventour-Robinson, Pride’s on site Chef Manager, “The parents and school are delighted with the lunches; they feel happy in the knowledge that the children are receiving safe, healthy and tasty food. We’ve already started working on the Gold Award, which also entails promoting more non-meat dishes as part of a balanced climate-friendly diet, so the children have some interesting vegetarian dishes on the way!”
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