35902 (2025). Hon Willow-Jean Prime to the Associate Minister of Education

35902 (2025). Hon Willow-Jean Prime to the Associate Minister of Education: How many, if any, school lunches were wasted during the week of July 14th 2025, expressed as an overall number?

Hon David Seymour: I am advised by the Ministry of Education that the number of surplus lunches across the programme will be reported by suppliers and internal model schools in the end of Term 2 survey, and collated in Term 3. One of the external model suppliers, the School Lunch Collective (SLC), publishes surplus meal data on their website daily here: https://www.schoollunchcollective.co.nz/. In the week of 14 July 2025, the SLC delivered 516,345 meals. Of these meals, 10.5% (54,094) were returned to the SLC.