Putting the Education Back in Education Catering

Maintaining a proper diet and adequate nutritional intake is a vital cornerstone of our health. It’s also far, far easier said than done. Eating healthily is as much a habit as it is an active effort, and the habits we’re raised into as children – whether we learn naturally, or with the helping hand of a well designed education catering solution – rarely leave us in our adult lives. 

That’s why gather by Cater Care is committed to a number of education initiatives aimed at helping students get a strong nutritional start in life. In addition to supplying valuable educational material, our dietitians from our Food Team also regularly make trips out to sites to deliver some hands-on nutritional education to eager students. Late in August of 2024, our Food Team had the pleasure of visiting some of the schools we serve in South Australia to share their knowledge. 

 

Why should school catering companies hit the road?

It’s no secret that the science behind food and nutrition can be a touch dense or intimidating. While equipping ourselves with all the information we can about nutrition is important for maintaining our health, it can be easy to get snowed underneath all the textbooks and table talkers. 

Face-to-face conversations allow students to learn in a more interactive fashion, process information at their own pace, and ask questions as needed. Sometimes all that’s needed to enhance education is breaking down a difficult concept into simple pieces, and having a dietitian and education catering expert on-hand can make planning out a healthier diet change from an impossible puzzle to easy as pie. 

 

Going on Tour

This most recent tour was one of the most extensive that our Food Team has embarked on yet. Several of our partners in the region were clamouring for our dietitian’s expertise, and a few excited phone calls quickly turned into a packed schedule that gave us the chance to visit six sites during their three days in South Australia.

At each school and boarding hall the visiting dietitians ensured that all the appropriate signage and education materials were in place and that the site was up to our sky-high expectations for gather’s serveries before beginning their presentation. Each of the six schools visited received their own individual presentations that touched on the same underlying themes of eating healthily, while the exact information was tailored to suit the school’s demographic. 

Each presentation delivered information of particular use to that school’s population. A girl’s boarding school enjoyed a presentation on Healthy Eating for Teenage Girls which heavily focussed on caloric and nutritional requirements for supporting their development through puberty, while the students at a university’s residential hall received a presentation on Eating Healthily for Young Adults that contained information about the caloric content of alcohol. 

 

One-on-one nutritional consultations were also a key part of the tour’s timetable. While our dietitians regularly provide nutritional advice meant to assist a school’s population, this service offers interested students the chance to get some one-on-one time to pick our dietitian’s brain for expert advice at no cost to the student. While the details are of course confidential and vary from student to student, a few key themes stood out from the team’s sessions: 

• • Aspiring athletes seeking advice on getting additional protein, who were offered a few pointers on maximising their daily intake.

• • Concerns from students who were looking for guilt-free mid meal snacks, who received extensive suggestions on some of the healthy options available. 

• • Older students who had become more aware of their dietary intake, and were seeking advice on making a few swaps to improve their health without dramatically altering their lifestyle. 

While the details of these sessions are of course confidential and vary from student to student, our team found themselves providing plenty of nutritional advice on supporting the bodily systems of aspiring young athletes!

 

Learning is a two-way street

Dietary education tours like these offer real positive outcomes for everyone involved. Students have the rare chance to speak with qualified subject matter experts about dietary health, with the additional opportunity to address their own complex concerns if they’ve booked in a one-on-one session. For a field as dense as health and nutrition, that can sometimes be all that’s needed to make the leap from textbook theory to practising in the kitchen. 

Making the trip out to sites also gives the gather team the perfect opportunity to check in with our partners to see if the students are happy or if there’s anything we can improve. The feedback we collect is essential for continually improving our services, and as we firmly believe that everyone from schoolmaster to student should have their say. 

Paving the way forwards

This latest trip down south proved to be an excellent opportunity for the Food Team to share some of their knowledge and get some valuable face-to-face time with our partner’s students. We firmly believe that school catering companies have a role to play as an essential part of the school community as well as a service provider, and we’re proud to continue serving up presentations and personalised conversations to help make that happen. 

If you’re interested in working with an education catering provider who’s dietitians spend as much time visiting your classrooms as they do planning your menus, then get in touch with David O’Brien via the contact details below.