Policy: Transporting Cooked Food

In this article we review our policies and procedures of how we transport cooked and chilled food between the schools if two schools share a common kitchen

Policy Intent:

All kitchen management and catering procedures must be in line with the regulations set out and guidance provided by the Food Standard Agency. For this policy, please review the help pages on the FSAs website relevant to hot food delivery

Should two schools share a common kitchen and use food delivery suppliers to deliver hot or chilled food between them, the schools must follow the below procedures:
  • Administrative controls - The nursery chef must be granted access to EY Man (the schools nursery management system) for both schools to be able to download the children's allergy and dietary schedules
  • Allergy schedules: School managers of both sites must either email chef (nurserychef@hatching-dragons.com) with allergy reports generated by EY Man that list all of the allergies for the children in attendance across the week OR ensure that chef has administrative access through EY Man to ensure that they can achieve the same themselves. See our allergy policy for further information
  • Storing safely: The school that holds the production kitchen must produce food in line with guidance and then immediately store hot food in sanitised containers at the required temperatures and insulate them within the provided thermodex boxes for delivery. These boxes must contain the a copy of the menu, along with the allergy schedules for the contents within and be sealed with a tamper seal to ensure cross contamination and risk of tampering from delivery agents is minimised. 
  • Logging temperatures - The temperature of the food must be recorded on the google form for school's receiving and delivering - see City's as an example - this will require both the manager sending and the manager receiving to log the temperature of the food sent / received, the submissions of which will be automatically collated in the School's Kitchen EHO records on the Google Drive. 
  • Delivery time - Food must be sent no later than 1130 to arrive on time for the provision of lunch at the partner school by 1200 every day. 
  • Use of delivery agents - the company reserves the right to use subcontracted delivery companies for the provision of food between schools. Such agents are used on the basis that the food will be contained in thermodex containers with tamper seals to act as a safeguard to interference from third parties. Managers must check, upon collection, that the tamper seal of the container is in place and have contingencies in place in case there is evidence that the food has been tampered with.
  • Tampered food procedure - should a container have the seal broken, the school manager must immediately communicate with the origination school to inform them of the incident. The food must not be used and be disposed of immediately. The school's business manager must lodge a formal complaint with the delivery supplier and escalate where required and find alternative arrangements.

Monitoring

Managers must review the kitchen EHO records on a weekly basis to ensure compliance with the Google Form submission on food temperature checks and tamper seal verification to ensure compliance on an ongoing basis