Holiday Activities and Food annual report

Food

We worked hard this year to increase the number of clubs providing nutritious hot food. Many of our providers work with caterers who are able to offer the children and young people a choice of main course dishes in the morning (sometimes up to five choices!) then deliver those specific meals at lunchtime. This means fuller tummies and less food waste.

We now supply our HAF providers with our recommended list of local caterers to ensure standards remain high and small Gateshead-based businesses are supported. The food waste charity Magic Hat have provided meals and workshops to clubs across the year to meet our nutrition and sustainability aspirations.

Whist we have not surveyed the young people, we have anecdotal evidence that many are trying new tastes and flavours thanks to our programme.

Additional funding and support

Morrisons supermarket have been very supportive of the programme providing fresh fruit to all our local Sports Pop Ups. Many of our providers have been supported by their local shops and stores such as Tesco, Asda, Greggs and smaller convenience stores.

Nutritional education and promotion of healthy living / lifestyles

Using additional funding provided by the DfE in December 2022, we partnered with DishUp! to deliver 600 recipe boxes to our HAF families. These boxes come complete with a recipe card (and associated social media cook-along video) and all the ingredients to cook a two-course meal to serve four people. DishUp! work hard to ensure the recipes use little household energy and could be easily repeated using inexpensive ingredients.

We identified that a pop-up cooking kit model would be the best way to deliver nutritional education to children, young people and families.

A trial of these kits and the sample recipes in February half-term meant we were able to fine tune the model. The trial involved different age groups (younger children, a teenager only day, a family day) and recipes were adapted for each session. 

As the HAF team were involved on a daily basis, we know that children tried lots of new ingredients and flavours. We encouraged the participants to use all their senses, especially their sense of smell as this is so closely linked with memory and we wanted them to remember the sessions once they had left the kitchen.

We have now trained our HAF providers in the use of the pop-up kits and some of our partners used them during Easter 2023 and many are planning to use them as part of their summer programme and Christmas programme.

We are also fortunate in the locations who use the caterer Chartwells that as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility commitments they provide some cooking lessons for children attending clubs on their sites in Gateshead.

Level 3 Food Safety Training

The additional HAF funding from DfE in 2022 also allowed us to support eight of our main community based food providers to attend a Level 3 Food Safety course. This not only improves food safety, it also builds confidence within the communities we work with.