Educaterers win Business of the Year!
Congratulations to Educaterers, Warwickshire County Council’s school catering Local Authority Traded Company (LATC), who have brought home the Lead Association for Catering in Education (LACA) ‘Business of the Year’ Award to Warwickshire!
The Business of the Year award recognises catering teams or organisations that have made an outstanding contribution to catering for schools in their local area and who continue to make a real difference to education catering.
The LACA Awards, which reward good management, strong performances and high achievements, were announced at a black tie ceremony at the Hilton Birmingham Metropole on 11th July, with members of the Educaterers team picking up the award.
Educaterers was the first local authority service in Warwickshire to be set up to run as an LATC, around 18 months ago, having formerly been Warwickshire County Caterers.
Many of Warwickshire County Caterers existing 700 workforce became Educaterers’ employees and the company has been focused on making sure that staff are given recognition for good work.
Since the change, Educaterers have been winning new contracts, including two from outside the county council’s catchment area in Oxford and Birmingham. It provides some 125,000 school meals a week.
The first 18 months of Educaterers’ operation have also seen three centres of excellence at three individual schools established, a secondary, junior and infant school, to further improve the cookery skills of Educaterers’ staff.
Over 75% of what Educaterers put on school dinner plates is homemade and that requires giving staff a greater set of skills.
The centres of excellence allow Educaterers to train both new and existing employees, as well as test-drive new ideas in service and menu development.
Eleven Educaterers employees from across Warwickshire have just passed the first Culinary Skills course to be run at their new Centre of Excellence at Boughton Leigh Junior School in Rugby (see full story), so congratulations and well done to them.