The rotten food served to students at Haeata Community Campus. Photo: Supplied / Haeata Community Campus
New Zealand Food Safety has found no food safety risks with one of the government's school lunch provider after an investigation into mouldy lunches found at a Christchurch school.
Rotten meals were served to some students at Haeata Community Campus last Monday.
NZ Food Safety says the most plausible explanation is that lunches meant to be served the week before were accidentally mixed with last Monday's meals.
Investigators found it was unlikely that the School Lunch Collective had delivered old meals.
The school has maintained the mouldy lunches were not the result of a mix-up at their end.
The food safety watchdog has made a number of recommendations following the investigation and said improvements to tracing and reporting processes would reduce risk of the issue repeating.
Food Safety deputy director-general Vincent Arbuckle said the most plausible explanation was that lunches intended to be served to students the week before, were accidentally mixed in with that day's lunches.
"We know the issue caused a lot of concern among parents and students at the school so we considered it important to provide accurate and independent information about the likely cause.
"After carefully examining all the possible causes, we are able to reassure parents that there is not a wider, or ongoing, food safety risk with the School Lunch Collective."
A number of other schools had received the same lunch on the same day with no reported issues and the Compass Christchurch Kitchen received the number of meals required for the following school day because of the minimal capacity of available chillers.
Haeata Community Campus did not receive any meals on the Friday prior to the mouldy meals being discovered on Monday as it had a teachers' only day.
That Friday, the same delivery truck was used to deliver a different meal to a number of other schools.
It was therefore unlikely the delivery to Haeata Community Campus on Monday could have included leftover meals from the previous week, Arbuckle said.
When looking for other possible causes, officers discovered that the school routinely kept an unknown number of Cambro containers onsite, he said.
"These are used to deliver lunches to primary school students in their classrooms. Leftovers are taken to Cambro containers in the cafeteria so that older students and teachers can help themselves."
The school had disputed this and said it did not keep any Cambro containers onsite.
Food Safety said it was most likely meals intended for the previous week were inadvertently left in those cafeteria Cambro containers and made available to students because the school did not track the number or contents of Cambro containers onsite and the 20 mouldy meals found were from the cafeteria Cambro container.
Arbuckle told Checkpoint that NZ Food Safety was not blaming the school for the situation.
"There are definitely improvements to the system which we have included in our report."
He said the management of the boxes could be improved with better tracking and more certainty about how many were at a school at any time.
"I think this looseness of control of these boxes contributed to the risk that has happened.
"If we tighten these controls up, then the chances of this happening again is lowered."
New Zealand Food Safety has made eight recommendations following the investigation.
They included:
- Improving communication about the handling of Cambro containers and considering their full traceabililty
- Better management of leftover meals
- Clarifying responsibilities for managing school meals
- Reviewing processes around food safety
Haeata Community Campus principal Peggy Burrows said the school had received a copy of the Food Safety report and it would review it alongside its own internal investigation, once that was complete on Friday.
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