2 11 APRIL 2024 News&Views Photographs: Photographs: Maja Smend, Food styling: Bianca Nice, Styling: Wei Tang, Art direction: Corrie Heale When the bell rings to mark the end of the teaching day, you expect a school kitchen to be wiped down, lights turned o and doors closed. But at Carr Junior School in York, a team of restaurant chefs gears up for evening service instead, prepping Thai, Mexican, Spanish and Sri Lankan menus for mix-andmatch takeaways. Designed as the antithesis of the ‘dark kitchen’ direct-delivery model, which sees anonymous units set up on industrial sites to mass produce takeaways – around 750 are operational nationwide – School Kitchen caters for and is part of its community. Revenue from takeaway sales is shared with the school. Cookery lessons are provided for pupils and apprenticeships o ered to leavers. Employees are contracted on a living wage. Chefs, recruited locally, receive personalised progression plans and regular training. A dedicated cookery school is also in the pipeline. Sustainability is core to the business model too. Energy self-su cient, the kitchen runs on solar roof panels. Deliveries are made by bike or electric moped, in reusable, recyclable and compostable packaging. Ingredients are seasonal and sourced as locally as possible, with veg beds currently under construction in the school grounds, so pupils can learn grow-your-own skills. Set to expand to a second York school An environmentally friendly initiative is using kitchens out of hours to prepare dishes from around the world, raising welcome funds for their hosts. Alice Ryan reports CHEFS GO BACK TO SCHOOL FOR NEW TAKEAWAY SERVICE stretched. “Funding is pretty much comparable with where it was 14 years ago,” he says. “But the things looked-for from schools have grown quite considerably.” With change-of-use planning permission granted, allowing Carr Junior’s kitchen to be used commercially on five evenings and one lunchtime – Saturday – every week, customers can order from all four world-food menus at once, meaning parents can try a Sri Lankan curry with sides while children enjoy Mexican favourites such as tacos and burritos. This unique approach, coupled with the fact that every cuisine is cooked by specialists to ensure authenticity, is, says David, a big part of what marks School Kitchen out from the takeaway crowd. With parents facing time and cost of living pressures, School Kitchen also o ers a ordable pre-order evening meals for Carr Junior’s 300 pupils, aged 7 to 11. All freshly cooked, nutritionally balanced and priced between £2 and £3 per portion, they can be taken home to be heated up. “This started with me asking: if you were to do this ideal thing, what is the plan? Something which is sustainable, which treats its employees well,” reflects David. “Hopefully this is just the beginning.” this summer, then to educational trusts in Leeds and Harrogate, School Kitchen is the brainchild of David Nicholson. Having spent the bulk of his food career working for corporate giants, he quit a rat-race job determined to take a di erent direction. “It sounds like a corny thing to say, but I wanted to do something that was good,” David explains. “This was 2018 and direct delivery was taking o , along with dark kitchens. I wanted to find a di erent way of doing it that was still a viable option.” School kitchens, left empty out of hours, seemed an obvious base. “It just made sense,” recalls David, “yet it had never been done before, and I wondered if that was because it wasn’t doable. In fact, the [real challenge] was finding a trust to go first. Lots thought it was a lovely idea – they just didn’t want to be the first to do it.” But North Yorkshire’s South Bank Multi Academy Trust saw the potential. The venture’s planet- and people-friendly ethos was a big draw, as was the chance to attract new revenue. Chief financial o cer Michael Gidley explains that, while school funding remains reasonably stable, budgets are increasingly ‘It’s something which is sustainable and treats employees well. Hopefully this is just the beginning’ TEAM EFFORT A takeaway from Pirivena (far left); Gulroz Khan and delivery rider Tshering Dendup (top); the School Kitchen team (above); chicken pibil burrito from Quetzalcoatl (below)
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDY5NzE=