Fab Food Primary Schools Programme
Fab Food is a ground-breaking initiative designed to support primary schools in reducing food waste. It is being delivered in partnership with Sainsbury’s as part of its Waste less, Save more scheme.
We have been trialling a five-step process in primary schools:
- Food waste audit to see how much food is being wasted, what is wasted most often and why.
- Action plan - written jointly by the school and our staff based on what we discovered during the audit.
- Take a tour of Sainsbury’s in Swadlincote to find out what is being done to tackle food waste in store and show pupils how food can be packaged to make it stay fresher for longer.
- Activities and lessons in school - these include campfire cooking, food tasting sessions, magic sessions and other activities to make saving food fun and memorable.
- Follow up food waste audit - finding out if we have saved any food.
The action plan is varied to suit each school. For example, in some schools, we found that free fruit and other food meant a lot was wasted. Sharing free fruit throughout the school and allowing pupils to say how much or little they want of everything on the menu (rather than standard portion sizes) helped save waste.
If you would like to reduce food waste in your school, please download the Fab Foods pack (pdf, 3.9mb). It’s full of action plans, worksheets and activities to make reducing food waste fun and memorable.
Other activities have included inviting ‘Magic Tim’ to create a magic show, using fun and magic tricks to remind children and adults about saving food and how much money that can also save. Teachers valued the experience, as shown in our video.
The nine primary schools involved in the trial experienced a food waste reduction of between 7% and 37%.
Sharing the results, methods, resources and ideas are a key part of the project and we will be adding documents to this page as soon as they are available on the Sainbury's website.
The Fab Food and Menu Magic projects both triumphed in the national Green Apple Environmental Awards, winning Local Authority Champion and Gold Winner in the food and drink category.
To find out more, email rosliston@southderbyshire.gov.uk and put ‘Sainsbury’s Waste less, Save more: Fab Food’ as the subject or telephone 01283 535039.
You can also contact us via the Swadlincote Waste less, Save more Facebook page or the WLSM Facebook group.
Tim's Menu Magic