56424 (2025). Hon Willow-Jean Prime to the Associate Minister of Education
Written Question
Published date: 17 Dec 2025
56424 (2025). Hon Willow-Jean Prime to the Associate Minister of Education: How many, if any, school lunches were wasted during the week of October 13th 2025, expressed as an overall number?
Hon David Seymour: I am advised by the Ministry of Education that surplus counts for meals not eaten at the end of lunch service are being monitored and used for continuous improvement of the programme.
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/
For the week of 13 October 2025, 13.1 percent of the lunches supplied by the SLC were reported as being surplus (61,909 lunches).