The concepts relieve primary schools of as many tasks as possible. The aim is to achieve an optimal impact on children's eating habits and health.

About the concepts

The three concepts vary in terms of setup, offerings, freedom of choice, support and costs. This allows LunchMaatjes to optimally align with the possibilities of each school and team.

  1. Lunch products: This is an entry-level concept for schools that have support available to prepare the lunch. At minimal cost, LunchMaatjes delivers all lunch products to the school. The school's support staff spreads the toppings on the slices of bread and distributes these, together with the vegetable snacks, among the classes.
  2. Lunch package: when the school has a little more budget available, the topped slices of bread, crackers and vegetable snacks can be delivered to each class in a lunch package, allowing pupils to choose their own topped slices of bread and vegetable snacks.
  3. Full self-serve lunch: with this option, schools receive a buffet from which pupils can make their own choices of bread type, toppings, and hot and cold vegetable snacks with the help of LunchMaatjes staff.

For each concept, a basic weekly menu has been developed, with options for variation in toppings. For this purpose, the current recommendations for a healthy lunch for children were translated, in consultation with the Netherlands Nutrition Centre, into the most comprehensive possible structure for a lunch buffet. In addition to the possible offerings from the Wheel of Five, the recommendations allow room for daily choices. These have been incorporated both through ingredients in the specials offered and through variation in toppings, so that children with different (cultural) taste preferences have sufficient choice. A monthly menu has also been developed based on a seasonal vegetable annual cycle, in which a vegetable of the week appears in different forms in the offerings, for example in a soup, salad or spread.

For this purpose, suitable educational materials and resources for parental involvement were developed for each concept together with an external partner, STERK & ZOET. For example, vegetable cards placed with the lunch offerings introduce pupils to the products on the buffet. Each vegetable is accompanied by information about its content, taste or growth/origin.

Read the Louis Bolk Institute's research here.