Chevallum State School tuckshop growing a fresh food culture

Chevallum State School, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, is serving up fresh, seasonal meals to students and staff straight from its tuckshop.

The school’s recipe for success? The tuckshop, known as Café C, uses the produce students grow and harvest in the school’s Kitchen Garden Program to make delicious, nutritious school meals.

Café C is open for lunch every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and serves snacks on Tuesday. Run by a paid convener and a band of dedicated parent volunteers, the cafe boasts creative seasonal menus. Current menu items include tuna and cucumber sushi, salad wraps, Greek salad, and spinach and feta rolls.

“Everything is cooked from scratch,” explained the school’s Kitchen Garden Program Coordinator, Judy Fisher.

Judy said the healthy canteen meals have helped change the cultural and social norms of the school community. She said the impact on students has been remarkable.

“It becomes the normal way to do things – the understanding that cooking healthy and from scratch is the way it’s done,” Judy said.

Supplying produce to feed a school of around 500 students is no easy task, and the school has 20 garden beds to provide the amount of produce needed. Judy said it is well worth the effort, as the benefits to the school community extend beyond the lunchroom. She said parent involvement in the school has soared, spurred on by the new volunteer opportunities created through the canteen.

Judy said volunteers have been a crucial ingredient in the cafe’s success. She said the cafe provides volunteer opportunities for parents who wouldn’t normally volunteer in the classroom, creating a more inclusive school community. The opportunity to prepare food for school meals has brought many new faces in to volunteer at the school, and has helped parents connect with each other.

The school actively engages with parents and uses a rotation system to ensure consistency in volunteer numbers. The classes take it in turns to provide volunteers for the canteen – each week, the parents from the rostered class volunteer in the cafe. The school also has a ‘parent rep’ who is the go-to person for parents.

Parents who work during the school day can help in the cafe’s Home Bake program. The school provides a range of recipes that parents can take home to bake healthy, homemade treats. The baked goods are then served up in the cafe as nutritious, preservative-free snacks.

As well as providing the ingredients for delicious seasonal meals, using school-grown produce minimises the food miles involved in buying produce and reduces the school’s carbon footprint. Pantry items needed for the tuckshop are also sourced locally through partnerships with organic grocery stores. Volunteers in the cafe package the school meals themselves, using only biodegradable packaging and environmentally friendly cutlery.

Café C was recognised for its sustainability efforts, and dedicated volunteers at the Queensland Top 10 Tuckshop of the Year Awards in 2010. The school was awarded Most Environmentally Friendly Tuckshop and Volunteer Team of the Year.

Judy said making all the food for the tuckshop from scratch costs more than buying in pre-packaged food, but the school sees Café C as a service for the community, and not as a profit-making venture.  Every September, the school holds a big fundraiser to support the canteen and Kitchen Garden Program so they are not relying on the canteen’s profit margin.

Judy’s advice to other schools considering linking their tuckshop or canteen and kitchen garden is to start small.

“Let the link between the tuckshop and garden grow naturally, because if it starts out too big and fails, no one will want to try to do it again!” she said.

Judy said the resources and face-to-face training provided by the Foundation are a great help to schools, and have been an invaluable support for their Kitchen Garden Program and tuckshop.

• Would you like to find out how your school or early years centre could start a kitchen garden program? Then contact our friendly Support Team on support@kitchengardenfoundation.org.au or 13000 SAKGF (13000 72543).