Free school meals: Jack Monroe says children are 'going hungry'
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused swathes of Ukrainian butchers to go back to their homeland to fight off Russian forces, in what has been described as an “exodus”. It comes after the war has already caused a shock in supply for many common commodities, like oil, gas, nickel, and fertiliser. Now, chicken dinners are the latest to feel the squeeze, as British schools find themselves plunged into a crisis of a shortage of Ukrainian butchers.
Catering companies are facing difficulties producing nutritional meals for millions of children, particularly as the cost of food staples surges while the amount that schools can pay remains fixed.
One food wholesaler admitted that the price of chickens had skyrocketed due to a shortage of Ukrainian workers at Polish poultry factories.
This is significant to the UK because Poland is a major supplier of chicken in the UK, and the disruption had caused the price of poultry to rise by a fifth.
Kym-Marie Cleasby, director of Sue Brady Catering in Wiltshire, warned that the “huge” cost pressures she is facing have resulted in her company providing meals to primary schools at a loss.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Ms Cleasby warned that the strict guidelines the Government has imposed on the nutritional quality of meals, and how much schools can pay for them, had left her company with “paper-thin” margins.
She said: “The rising prices are huge and severely impacting our ability to be able to produce quality meals for our schoolchildren.
“We can’t really change too many of the dishes on the menu.
“The Government has quite rightly set nutritional values on the food we give to children, which means we have to provide a certain amount of protein, a certain amount of carbohydrates and so on, so we ensure the children get a balanced diet.”
“So it’s really a balancing act, trying to find suppliers who can supply the correct quality of food at the right price.
“It is a crisis at the moment. And it mainly affects primary school children, who are the ones most at risk of not getting the balanced diet that they need.”
She also said that she was reviewing the costs that her firm was incurring at the moment, and looking at whether she was operating at a loss.
Ms Cleasby added: “The price of school meals is set by the Government, it hasn’t changed for nine years, it hasn’t been adjusted for inflation or anything else, and currently any margin in there to enable a company to carry on operating has been eroded.”
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This comes as Andrew Selley, the chief executive of food wholesaler Bidcorp UK, warned earlier this week that unless the Government spend more on school, hospital and care home meals, the UK would face a dire choice between reducing either the quality or quantity of the food.
He said: “A lot of UK chicken used to come from Poland.
“A lot of the workers in the poultry factories in Poland were from Ukraine, so they’ve gone back to fight in Ukraine, which has reduced output.
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