Christchurch school to run its own lunches after mouldy meal dispute

Haeata Community Campus in Christchurch has been granted an exemption under the Healthy School Lunches programme, known as Ka Ora, Ka Ako, to run its own lunch programme. According to RNZ, the in-house programme will start from Term 1 of next year and will use the school's industrial kitchen facilities.

The change follows a dispute over mouldy lunches. A teacher at the Years 1–13 school noticed that mince and potato meals were covered in mould after they had been handed out to several children. The school said it had recalled all of the lunches because of the contamination. The principal, Peggy Burrows, said the school was not to blame while authorities reviewed footage. Burrows had earlier raised concerns about meals arriving frozen and about excess food waste. She and Associate Education Minister David Seymour then took part in a public exchange over the incident.

New Zealand Food Safety investigated the lunch provider and found no food safety risks. Investigators considered it unlikely that the external provider, the School Lunch Collective, had delivered old meals. They judged the most plausible explanation to be that lunches meant for the previous week had been accidentally mixed with fresh meals. Food Safety recommended changes to tracing and reporting processes to prevent the incident from happening again.

Seymour suggested the outcome was "humble pie" for the school, after the investigation found no wider food safety issue at Haeata Community Campus. The Stuff report carried his comments. Earlier, in March 2025, Seymour said in a statement that exemptions would not be granted under the programme. That statement responded to the school's request to drop its lunch provider.

Kelly Gibson, presiding member of the school's board, said that moving away from the external provider was a victory for students, staff and the wider community. The school had campaigned to move away from the centralised catering model, in which an outside provider supplied the meals. The in-house programme will employ local kitchen staff and caterers, and it will include vocational training for senior hospitality students. Gibson said the model could serve as a framework for other schools with specialised facilities.

The Healthy School Lunches programme is large. The Ministry of Education's 2023 annual report says it provided a lunch each school day to more than 230,000 ākonga (students) in 998 schools and kura Kaupapa Māori, which are schools taught mainly in te reo Māori. The Press reported that the Ministry of Education told Haeata Community Campus its lunch order would be cut to 400 lunches a day, so the surplus could feed other students.