29504 (2025). Hon Willow-Jean Prime to the Associate Minister of Education

29504 (2025). Hon Willow-Jean Prime to the Associate Minister of Education: How many, if any, school lunches were wasted during the week of May 26th 2025, expressed as an overall number?

Hon David Seymour: I am advised by the Ministry of Education (the Ministry) that surplus counts for meals not eaten at the end of lunch service, will be reported in the Term two survey by suppliers and internal model schools as part of the end of term survey. Suppliers and internal model schools have been requested that the surplus count is conducted over a 10 day window during the term, as per previous iterations of the programme. One of the external model suppliers, the School Lunch Collective (SLC), publishes surplus meal information on their website daily here: https://www.schoollunchcollective.co.nz/. In the week of 26 May 2025, the SLC delivered 519,059 meals. Of these meals 51,220 surplus meals were collected from schools and returned to commercial production kitchens.