A winning team – Norse Catering joins Norwich City FC on healthy school meals campaign

Norse Catering has teamed up with Norwich City Football Club on a four-week, healthy eating programme for children in Norfolk and Suffolk schools.

Active Canaries Health Month saw the Premier League’s first team chef and nutritionist work with the catering company to serve school dinners inspired by some of the top footballers in the country.

Players Dimitris Giannoulis and Josh Sargent who inspired two of the themed lunches surprised pupils at Queens Hills Primary, in Norwich for a ‘special assembly’. Children from Queens Hills were delighted to receive a visit from their favourite players and it certainly inspired them to continue their education with nutrition.

On four Thursdays in March, almost 16,000 meals were served across 70 participating schools, the dishes designed by chef Dan Savage and nutritionist Tom Geeson-Brown.

The dishes were based on the national cuisines of City players Teemu Pukki, Josh Sargent, Dimitris Giannoulis, and Tim Krul.

They included Pukki’s Finnish Fish Pie Pasta Bake and Giannoulis’s Greek Chicken Flatbread.

Children learned the basic nutritional information for each and were given a recipe card to take home to help them recreate the meals with their families.

Andrew Lipscomb, Operations Director at Norse Catering, said: “We were very excited to work with Norwich City Football Club and its Premier League players.

“Our emphasis is always on serving nutritious meals. The menu development team at Norse Catering concentrates on making sure every school meal we serve is carefully planned to ensure it is healthy, balanced and adheres to school food standards.

“Active Canaries Health Month brought a whole new dimension to healthy eating, however, as it presented the concept to children in a way they can really relate to.”

In addition to the weekly meals, Norwich City’s Community Sports Foundation delivered online wellbeing workshops to classes on Wednesday mornings, focusing on sleep, nutrition, physical activity and giving.

The programme was backed by the Canaries Covid-19 Community Fund, which was created in 2020 by donations from first team players, senior staff, and directors to support the community response and recovery to the pandemic.

Norse Catering, part of the Norse Group, provides nutritional meals to almost 200 schools in Norfolk and Suffolk, with more than 75% of the food it served prepared from scratch.

All meat is sourced from within East Anglia and is Red Tractor assured, certifying it to rigorous standards; fruit and vegetables are seasonal and locally grown, where possible.

The team worked closely with Norwich City to ensure all the Active Canaries Health Month meals were nutritionally balanced and adhered to school food standards.

Dan Savage, chef for Norwich City’s first team said: “We had great fun putting these dishes together with the players; Tom and I are delighted to play a role in helping to improving the health and wellbeing of local pupils.

“We were very impressed with the healthy school meals that Norse Catering serves every day.

“The dishes we designed also balance all the important areas of nutrition and we hope that our involvement will further highlight to the children what they need to eat to be healthy.”

Amanda Cooper, Business Account Manager with Norse Catering’s Menu Development Team, said: “It’s been a really interesting project to be part of and has given us a fascinating insight into what the players eat to help their performance.

“We took the original recipes from Daniel Savage and the team at NCFC and trialled them with some of our school cooks to see what would work operationally across our sites.

“We also looked at any adjustments we needed to make to the ingredient list or method as all school kitchens vary in size and capacity.”

Karen Greville, another Business Account Manager at Norse Catering, explained the menu team always caters for a number of children with medically defined allergies.

“We therefore also wanted to be able to create suitable allergen-aware menus for this project that meant these children could also take part, if at all possible,” she said.

“We were successful in doing this and those went down very well too.”

She added: “This promotion has enabled us as a team to trial some new recipe ideas with children and gain valuable feedback from the dining room.

“Moving forward, we would love to see Pukki’s Finnish Fish Pie Pasta Bake feature on our autumn and winter primary school menu as we believe it’s a really tasty recipe and a great way to encourage the children to eat fish!”