31852 (2025). Hon Willow-Jean Prime to the Associate Minister of Education

31852 (2025). Hon Willow-Jean Prime to the Associate Minister of Education: How many lunches meant to serve specific dietary or religious needs were not delivered during the week of June 2nd 2025?

Hon David Seymour: There were around 749,000 meals delivered in the four-day week of 2 June 2025, across the 1011 schools in the programme. The Ministry does not track dietary meals across all suppliers and internal meal providers in the programme daily. The School Lunch Collective (SLC), which deliver meals to 43% (436) of schools in the programme provides the Ministry of Education with daily dietary information delivered to schools. In the week of 2 June 2025, all 46,479 specific dietary or religious meals were delivered by the SLC. Of the total meals (427,595) delivered by the SLC in this week, 31 schools received meals late and two schools had part delivery. This was due to frozen meals arriving and slowing down cook times, a sick driver, and operational challenges with the change in production kitchen locations in Auckland. At one school, eight meals were missed due to a meal box not being dropped off. Seven out of the eight children ate the standard meal, and one had noodles from the school. This is also my response to written parliamentary question 31854 (2025).