Having catered at Lichfield Cathedral School for the last five years, leading education caterer, The Brookwood Partnership, part of CH&Co Group, has successfully retained the catering provision for a further seven years, with a contract value of £1.9M.
Brookwood caters for the school over two sites. The seniors at The Palace, adjacent to the famous Cathedral, and for the preparatory school, in Longdon.
As part of the contract, Brookwood’s design team will undertake a full refit of the dining facilities. This will include re-modelling the space to encompass a new main meal counter, grab and go and deli bar.
Commenting on the news, Brookwood’s Managing Director of Operations, Sue Frayn said, “Having built up a partnership with the school management team, pupils and teaching staff over the last five years, we were able to interpret and fully understand the needs of the school. Specifically, we focused on developments into the future. I am absolutely delighted that we will continue to provide our modern, stylish and healthy food service with a fabulous up-to-date facility.”
David Brown, Bursar for Lichfield said, “Brookwood have been part of our school for a number of years and their catering team is an integral part of the school family. We felt they best understood our needs and as such, presented us with value for money ways in how to take our catering to the next level. We very much look forward to Brookwood continuing to provide us with their high standard of food service as well as engaging our pupils with their educational healthy eating initiatives.”
Brookwood is well known in the education catering sector for engaging pupils in eating healthily through their Eating for Life programme. A recent activity which has been warmly welcomed at Lichfield is their Fisherman Finn and Fantastic Fish initiatives. These age related activities encourage pupils to eat different types of fresh fish, learn more about lesser known types, understand the importance of fish as part of a healthy diet and learning about sustainable fishing. Activities in the dining room offer the pupils the ability to inspect the fish in its raw state and then get to taste the prepared dish.
Commenting on these new initiatives, Lichfield’s Head Teacher, Sue Hannam recently said: “Brookwood continually add value by helping our pupils learn more about their food as well as experience different tastes. They tailor their initiatives to each age group and really help pupils understand the benefits of eating healthily.”
Helping pupils to know more about healthy eating and where their food comes from, led to Brookwood scoring 100% in the healthy eating section of the Sustainable Restaurant Association ‘Food Made Good’ accreditation. This independent assessment, saw Brookwood become the first schools’ caterer to achieve the top level 3-star rating in 2014 and are still the only schools’ caterer with this level of rating.