Eat My Lunch to feed 16,500 kids under Government's free school lunches scheme

Wednesday, 9 December 2020

Social enterprise Eat My Lunch has won the tender for the Government’s Ka Ora, Ka Ako healthy school lunches programme, to feed 16,500 Kiwi kids a day from next year.

On Budget day earlier this year the Government committed to feeding 200,000 children a day in 2021 through a free school lunch programme. The programme, launched in 2019, currently feeds 8000 children.

Eat My Lunch will provide about 3 million lunches to kids across schools in Auckland and Wellington during the course of next year.

Its founder Lisa King said Eat My Lunch already fed about 1800 kids a day in 77 schools across the two cities.

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Lisa King said Eat My Lunch had brought attention to the state of child poverty in New Zealand.

She said 41 of the 77 Eat My Lunch schools were part of the Ministry of Education programme, with another 150 schools on the waiting list. Eat My Lunch planned to continue its “buy one, give one” model to continue supporting those schools.

For every meal that was bought from the social enterprise, one was given away to a child.

King said the social enterprise was hiring 189 people to scale up and deliver the number of lunches planned for the programme, which were specifically developed to meet the Ministry of Health’s high nutrition guidelines.

“When I first started Eat My Lunch, our goal was to give 10,000 lunches a day by 2023 – so being involved in an initiative like this places us in a position beyond what we’d ever imagined we’d be able to achieve,” she said.

In the five years since Eat My Lunch started, the business has given over 1.6 million lunches away, hired 40 permanent staff, and worked with more than 25,000 volunteers to make free lunches for kids.

King said Eat My Lunch had brought attention to the state of child poverty in New Zealand and helped fast track the healthy school lunches programme.

“What we have achieved is a brilliant example of the fact that businesses centred on social purpose can generate real change. We are so proud to be a part of this initiative and to use our learnings from the last five years to help make a difference for even more Kiwi kids,” King said.

In 2017 Foodstuffs North Island, the supermarket chain, which owns New World, Pak 'n Save and Four Square supermarkets, bought a 26 per cent stake in Eat My Lunch.