Zane slams firm behind pricey school meal hampers
FREE school meals hero Zane Powles has slammed the company organising food hampers to vulnerable school children during the lockdown, accusing them of profiteering during the pandemic. An image of one hamper provided by company Chartwells has gone viral on Twitter after being shared by user Roadside Mum and even attracted the attention of footballer and free school meals champion, Marcus Rashford. Following the outcry on social media, the government has announced there will be an investigation into the quality of food provided by the company. Mr Powles told the BBC: “I thought it was profiteering from the company really by charging double what we would normally pay for a packed lunch against a hot meal.
“In the first lockdown, they were delivering all the resources to us on a Monday and we were making the lunches and packing them ourselves so all they were really doing is delivering the stuff to us.
“How they were charging almost double I just can’t understand it at all.”
Zane has famously continued his brilliant efforts to deliver food to children and families who need it in the Western Primary School community and beyond throughout the pandemic and into the current lockdown. He said the school had opted not to have pre-packed hampers for the parents as the community found it useful to continue the deliveries as a form of welfare check and to reduce the number of parents coming into school which they would have to do to collect a hamper.
Zane criticised the cost of the food during the last lockdowns and said that the situation had barely improved with the school, and himself often supplementing their deliveries to ensure the children had some variety in their diet. He said: “For the first two days obviously no one was ready for the changeover from the hot meals that we were getting to the packed lunches. So the night after the Prime Minister made the announcement I was out at the supermarket getting the packed lunches for the next two days. “Now, what I got from the supermarket was much better than what we get from the company that we use and it was half the price. “We’ve found that throughout the lockdown that what we get from the company isn’t the greatest in the world and it is, believe it or not, nearly double the price of what we pay for the hot meal pre-lockdown. “We weren’t happy at all.”
The school uses the same com
pany that has sparked outrage on social media following pictures emerging of the paltry hampers that it has been distributing to vulnerable families on the breadline. The taxpayer-funded packages supplied by Chartwells UK are supposed to be worth £30 and recently some commenters on the social media post calculated the contents would actually cost around £5 from a budget supermarket.
In a response to the criticism, Chartwells told the BBC: “We take our responsibility to provide children with access to nutritious meals very seriously and we’ve worked very hard to provide food hampers at very short notice.
“Our hampers follow department for education specifications and contain a variety of ingredients to support families in providing meals throughout the week.”
They claimed that the images of hampers shared on social media fell some way short of their own expectations and they were launching an investigation into the standards of hampers distributed.