Team Gives Full Support

The Premier Foods home economist team has a combined industry experience of more than 200 years. It is "bursting with ideas" and is always keen to offer advice, support and guidance to staff in secondary schools. Committed to helping the education sector, the team provides new recipes and nutritional analysis, help with costings and marketing, as well as running practical courses such as 'try before you buy' demos, healthy eating talks and Premier Foods Culinary Academy activity. Most importantly this help is free for any school catering unit wanting to use it. A free telephone advice line is also operated so that school caterers can get information about products and recipe suggestions. Premier's head home economist Kate Snow says: "We know that schools find it difficult to implement the new nutrient standards that have just come into force in secondary schools and so we provide recipe solutions, using our products, that help unit managers uphold these standards. For example, getting enough iron into cooked recipes can be a real challenge, so we have developed a series that have a high iron content. One of the recipes is called the 'choccie beet cake', using the McDougalls chocolate cake mix, and combining beetroot and treacle to create a cake rich in iron." Snow says the team has also produced recipes containing a good proportion of fruit while keeping sugar levels to a minimum. "As well as developing these recipes we can also supply the nutritional content of each one down to each portion size by using our Saffron computer programme. This helps school catering departments save time and uphold the new regulations." When it comes to working with the new standards Snow says: "We have researched them and worked with school catering units across the country to create solutions so that schools adhere to these standards. With school authorities in Birmingham, we developed hand held snack recipes based around McDougalls bread mixes for the morning break. These were tray bake recipes that were easy to prepare and cook so that they were ready in time for the morning break period." To further help school caterers Snow says: "From October 1 to November 3 we are running eight one-day culinary academies across the UK giving unit managers the chance to enjoy a day of demos with practical sessions to learn new recipes. This is the second year we have run these sessions and the feedback from our first year has been superb." • Premier Foods' caterer advice line number is: 0800 328 4246