10 Reasons to make you smile

1 Fresh food, cooked on site every day

We believe every child – and school – deserves a fresh, healthy diet. So we make sure our meals are cooked on the day they are served. We're proud to share the Soil Association's aims to reach out through schools to give communities' access to seasonal, local and organic food and many of our schools use organic products such as milk, bread, vegetables and pulses.

6 Personalised service, designed around your school

Unlike most 'off-the-shelf' options, we work with your staff and governors to develop menus that meet your school's individual needs. We work with the pupils, staff and parents of our client schools to deliver a bespoke menu that aims to provide popular choices that are fully compliant with the School Food Trust's nutritional standards.

For example, we have developed a school dinner money collection system just for our schools. Click here to find out more . . .

2 Regularly updated modern menus

We offer a varied and imaginative menu cycle, which is refreshed at least every three weeks. Our menus can be built around your school's tastes, including multi-cultural, traditional and inventive options.

7 Support and advice for your dining room design

Good dining is about more than purely the food and, if you choose, our team can also provide advice on kitchen layout and equipment, dining room furnishing and décor. We believe school dining should be an all round enjoyable experience.

3 Excellent value for money

We provide a service that provides the ultimate balance between cost and quality where every aspect of the service is resourced efficiently, but comprehensively, to enable a consistent high quality of service at affordable prices.

8 Quality assured levels of hygiene, food standards and safety

All of our staff have passed the Basic Food Hygiene Certificate and Senior Management are trained to Advanced level. To make sure quality never slips, we employ a Quality Assurance Team who carry out random inspections of kitchen and dining facilities and reports back to our Senior Management Team.

4 Knowing that your pupils are eating healthily

Children need to be encouraged to eat plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables which provide a rich source of essential vitamins and minerals. We aim to encourage children to understand and identify with the taste and texture of the items on display and minimise the anxiety of trying something that may be new. We will actively support the school with any initiatives where we can to provide a positive contribution to the engagement of children with food.

9 Specially trained chefs

With ISS Caterhouse, every school kitchen is managed by one of our own employees. We aim to maintain the very highest standards and do not allow agency staff to control our kitchens. Our chefs visit every new school to explain our approach to catering staff and help them provide fresh meals, 'the Caterhouse way'.

5 Food tasting focus groups

We work with our schools to agree a campaign of information and promotion that would lead to a sustained level of additional users of the school meals service. We start through a focus group and/or customer survey that would get the views of parents, pupils and the staff at the school. We then focus our campaign around those issues that are important and are most likely to have a positive impact on uptake.

10 School lunches that you can genuinely look forward to

After a busy morning in the classroom, a healthy, freshly cooked lunch is just the thing children and staff need to prepare them for the afternoon’s activities. We aim to make the daily lunch service an enjoyable experience as well as providing good wholesome food.