May 2008
The background
Local Food Links Limited was originally established in 1999 as a trading subsidiary of the West Dorset Food and Land Trust. In 2006 Local Food Links took on the contract to deliver hot school meals to the Bridport Primary School pyramid. On 23 January 2007 Local Food Links was registered as an independent Industrial and Provident Society for community benefit.
Over the last two years, Food Links has developed a new type of hot school meals service in partnership with eight local primary schools in Bridport. The schools have no kitchens but are obliged to offer hot meals.
The decision was taken to set up a new social enterprise, with schools and parents as members, to provide hot meals to the eight schools. This allowed control over the menus, the sourcing of local, organic and fair-trade ingredients and the creation of local jobs in a rural area.
Action taken
Local Food Links decided on an integrated database system. Initially, a draft specification was written and circulated to local free software companies and tenders were invited. A local programmer developed an initial student order database ‘Meals’ for internal use. This system received individual student orders from the schools, allocated them against registered recipes and produced reports of production and ingredient requirements, and school serving lists.
A decision was made to have the handling of individual student orders remain the responsibility of school admin staff. The system was then adapted to handle consolidated orders. However, it was soon evident that this task placed an enormous burden on school staff and resulted in duplicate notices and errors.
A second system was needed, which would be multi-user and web-based.
Development for this new system has been kept in-house and is on-going and the long term aim is to meet all data processing requirements from student orders through to supplier purchase and provide enhanced management reporting (including statistical analysis and automated invoicing).
The benefits
A new central kitchen was completed in April, 2007. The Bridport School Meals Service has been building up gradually and by September 2008 the eight schools will have moved to five days per week, with production at 2,500 meals per week. A further four schools in neighbouring pyramids will also be supplied from the central kitchen in 2008-2009.
While the integrated database system was initially developed to meet Food Links’ internal information processing needs – and those of its partners – it has the potential to extend easily to direct online ordering by parents (this is now under development). Giving parents access to the system will allow Food Links to share more information about its menus, suppliers and products. Taking this forward, the online ordering system will become an important part of the communications and marketing strategy.
The system can also be offered to other regions and projects with similar administrative needs, and has the potential to reduce operating costs of other small school meal providers.
The challenges
With limited resources, the main concern was allocating the necessary staff time to systems development. This task has had to be taken on by Food Links’ existing staff so progress is at a slower rate than anticipated.
One of the key objectives for setting up a central social enterprise and hub kitchen was to achieve efficiency and cost savings, but a number of issues arose in setting up a service to supply eight schools. For example, processing paper-based meal orders took a lot of admin time and resulted in combined orders arriving in multiple formats. Also, in school meal provision, daily orders vary greatly depending on the menu and the schools served, so predicting ingredient levels was difficult.
Another concern was that sourcing of ingredients locally meant maintaining relationships with multiple small suppliers, with multiple purchase orders, which could increase the risk of overlooking ingredients. It was decided that an administration system would be developed to help the organisation meet the following objectives:
- Maintain minimal stocks of raw ingredients
- Minimise wastage of perishables
- Minimise staff time involved in calculating production quantities and ingredient requirements
- Reduce errors and eliminate duplication of data entry
- Support schools by providing an easy to use and accurate order processing facility.
Learning experience
Systems development is a significant task, involving significant costs. While the initial tenders received for the development of the ‘Meals’ system seemed expensive, in reality they reflected the scale of the project required. However, in-house development has allowed Local Food Links to be far more responsive to user needs. Future development and adaptation will be easier and cheaper.
Contact information
Tim Crabtree
Local Food Links Limited
Email: tim.crabtree@localfoodlinks.org.uk
