36307 (2025). Hon Willow-Jean Prime to the Associate Minister of Education

36307 (2025). Hon Willow-Jean Prime to the Associate Minister of Education: How many, if any, school lunches were wasted during the week of July 21st 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 2 survey by suppliers and internal model schools. Suppliers and internal model schools have been asked to conduct a surplus count over a ten-day window during the term, as per previous iterations of the programme. One of the external model suppliers, the School Lunch Collective (SLC), publishes daily surplus meal information on their website here: https://www.schoollunchcollective.co.nz/. In the week of 21 July 2025, the SLC delivered 512,243 meals. Of these meals, 11.6 percent (59,631) were returned to the SLC.