Nursery World - Special Report: Serving good food on a budget

How can early years settings cost-effectively provide children with nutritious and tasty meals at a time when food and energy bills are soaring? Karen Hart reports

Healthy ingredients can be the most cost effective.

With food inflation at its highest point for 13 years and many families struggling to provide healthy meals for children at home, nurseries are finding themselves with an increased responsibility to fill the nutrition gap.

Latest data from The Food Foundation shows that among households with three or more children, 42 per cent have suffered some form of food insecurity in the past month, compared with 16 per cent of households with no children.

The Government's cost of living support package does not account for household size, and so larger families with more children are inevitably suffering most.

Storal nurseries, a growing group of 25 sites across England, is responding to these challenges with a commitment to providing hot food for its children and to educating them about a wide range of cheaper, healthy foods, through growing its own.

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