Third of hot school meals do not meet basic nutritional standards – minister

At least a third of hot school meals on offer do not meet basic nutritional standards, Social Protection Minister Dara Calleary has said.

TDs, parents and others have raised concerns about the nutritional value of hot school meals, with Irish celebrity chef Darina Allen comparing them to “airline food”.

A dietitian was appointed in September who assessed 400 school meals on offer for free at primary schools across Ireland.

They assessed the meals for five basic nutritional values, out of a total of 16 different nutritional elements issued to providers as guidance.

Mr Calleary said on Wednesday a third of the meals offered did not meet at least three of the five basic nutritional standards.

“In our dietitian’s initial work, she has found general compliance (with) nutritional standards,” Mr Calleary said on RTE Radio.

“There are issues. There are issues pertaining to the availability of fruit and vegetables.”

The 16 nutritional guidelines include a recommendation that every meal should contain two servings of fruit, vegetables or salad, that fish is served once a week, and that salt should not be added to water when cooking rice or pasta.

The guidelines also state fresh drinking water should be available every day and that funding “must not be spent on sugar-sweetened drinks”.

They were published in 2021 as part of Healthy Ireland, the national framework which aims to improve the health of the Irish population.

Mr Calleary said the dietitian will next do random inspections in schools, and said 400 schools were inspected last year.

“There are 16 standards, she’s just looked at five initially. That’s why she wants to do more work,” he said.

“That’s why she wants to get into schools, because the predominance of her work to date has been desktop, looking at menus, so she’s going going to get out into schools.

“But I would say that the overall theme, the overall report, is in the right direction.”

He said that last April, he issued an instruction to remove high fat, high salt ‘treat’ foods from being offered, and 80% of food suppliers had adhered to it.

Mr Calleary said he wanted to reduce the number of ultra-processed foods in the hot school meal programme and said he would be “weeding out that remaining 20%”.

“They were initially designed as once a week option, the high salt, the high sugar foods – they became five days a week, so we’ve taken them off completely. I moved very quickly in that,” he said.

He said there are cold options available in some schools but hot meals are “better” nutritionally, and said another issue being examined by the dietitian was portion sizes, which could help to address food waste.

The scheme began in 2019 as a pilot scheme to provide meals in an effort to ensure children get one hot meal a day, at a cost of 54.3 million euro.

The hot school meals programme is expected to cost 280 million euro in 2026, a cost of 3.20 euro per meal, and involves 300 suppliers, 3,200 schools, and 550,000 eligible students.

“We’ve taken universal approach to this because you don’t know what’s happening in any home, and for children in particular, it’s important that they’re not differentiated. I think the universal approach is a far more positive and fair approach.”