Standard fare
It has long been suspected that the current School Food Standards (SFS) in England are not widely adhered to due to a lack of monitoring and enforcement. This week, the youth-led campaign group Bite Back supplied further evidence to support the suspicion.
Bite Back examined a sample of 500 state-funded secondary schools across England and found publicly accessible menus for 391 of them. It then used AI to analyse the menus against the current SFS and found 57% offering processed meat items such as burgers, nuggets, sausages and goujons more often than is permitted; 53% including non-permitted snacks; 37% offering hash browns as a standing breakfast or break option; and 31% including confectionery, such as chocolate chips or coatings, as an ingredient in desserts or bakes.
Menus flagged by the AI tool were reviewed by a Bite Back campaigner; if one violation was confirmed, the menu was labelled ‘non-compliant’. In all, 76% of the menus analysed had at least one confirmed violation.
“Young students have been saying for years that what appears on school menus often doesn’t give us the fuel we need to concentrate, learn and get through the school day,” explained Bite Back campaigner Carrera, 19. “We are surrounded by unhealthy products every day, even in the spaces that are supposed to be helping us grow and thrive,” she added.
Bite Back’s researchers noted how England is the only UK nation without any formalised mechanism for monitoring compliance to the SFS. “Implementing such a mechanism will be critical to ensuring that the bold efforts to improve the quality of school food in England are met,” they added.
The Requirements for School Food Regulations 2014 in England (known as the ‘School Food Standards’) define the foods and drinks that must be provided, those which are restricted and those that must not be provided in schools. The government is currently working on an ambitious overhaul of the standards which will see further restrictions to foods high in fat, sugar and salt and requirements to serve more fruit, vegetables, wholegrains and pulses.
An official response to a consultation on the new standards, which ran from April to June, is expected next month. “There’s a lot of really good stuff in there,” Naomi Duncan, chief executive of the charity Chefs in Schools, told The Small Print podcast earlier this year, as she highlighted the shift to more flexible protein offerings.
Bite Back called on school food providers to “embrace the new school food standards” and for the government to “make sure the rules are actually followed”.
A Department for Education (DfE) spokesperson told The Guardian they are aware that not every school is following the standards, which is “exactly why we will introduce a strengthened enforcement regime, alongside requiring every school to publish their food policy and menus online to improve transparency for parents”.
In 2024, DfE and the Food Standards Agency published the results of a pilot with 18 local authorities in England to see if food safety officers (FSOs) could carry out school food standards checks as part of their regular hygiene inspections. They found that FSOs could conduct the additional checks with many finding them straightforward to administer, however the pilot also identified challenges with the new system, including added pressure on the workload of FSOs, inconsistency in the extent to which schools acted to address reported instances of potential non-compliance, issues with communication between local authorities, schools and caterers especially when following up issues of potential non-compliance, and challenges over accountability for adherence to the standards.
Small Bites
Red flags at bluefin tuna farms
The aquaculture sector is no stranger to controversy but it is usually salmon producers whose welfare and environmental practices are under the microscope. This week, Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) turned the spotlight on farmed tuna – specifically bluefin tuna – with producers accused of putting pressure on wild fish populations and putting caged tuna under undue stress. Captured live at a crucial point in their reproductive season, wild Atlantic bluefin tuna “are dragged in large nets to farms where they are fattened and confined in sea cages”, explained CIWF in a report released this week. It detailed how one farmed tuna, producing 200kg of meat, could consume up to 3,000kg of wild-caught fish – the equivalent of up to 33,000 sardines. The NGO revealed an industry “boom”, with the number of licensed Atlantic bluefin tuna farms rising from 13 farms in 2006, to 123 in 2026. And from 2003, the total number of farmed tuna has jumped 19-fold, from around 55,000 to up to one million per year in 2024. The farms put “unique pressure” on wild populations and cause “exceptional distress” to those fish confined on farms given “their need to swim continuously just to breathe – over long distances in the wild”, CIWF said. The end market for farmed tuna tends to be luxury sushi and sashimi markets. CIWF is calling for a moratorium on any further expansion of the industry until regulation and reporting catches up.
Wheat price tracks water shortages
New research has laid bare the impact simultaneous water shortages in the world’s most important wheat-growing regions can have on commodity prices, with a knock-on effect on key ingredients like bread, pasta and breakfast cereals. Research just published in the journal Earth’s Future shows that severe water scarcity alone can explain around 74% of annual fluctuations in global wheat prices between 2000 and 2021. “What is new here is that we can document a clear link between widespread drought across the globe and the prices faced by consumers and food markets,” explained Professor Jørgen Olesen, from the department of agroecology at Aarhus University, Denmark, a co-author of the paper. Other factors are at play too. US grain farmers are facing their worst crisis in decades as the Iran war sends input costs spiralling. Escalating attacks by Russia and Ukraine on each other’s Black Sea ports and commercial vessels is also threatening to “choke off” seaborne grain exports from two of the world’s biggest suppliers, reported the FT this week. “It’s worse for the wheat market than Hormuz was for crude,” said Andrey Sizov, managing director of ag research firm SovEcon.
‘Junk’ food promoted at school show
Bite Back may have stolen the headlines this week in relation to the standard of food served up to children (see main story), however The BMJ served up an intriguing side dish with an investigation showing that more than a third of the firms exhibiting at the UK’s biggest school food show sell products high in fat, sugar or salt (HFSS). In total, 52 of the 137 companies with stands at The School Food People Show and Forum in Birmingham last month supply items including hot dogs, pizza, muffins and fizzy drinks. They included two specialist hot dog firms, a Belgian waffle maker and others selling cakes, cookies and muffins. One of these was displaying lemon and white chocolate muffins containing 35.5g of sugar and triple chocolate muffins containing 31g of sugar. The recommended daily sugar intake is 30g for adults and secondary school aged children. There were also cans of soft drink – promoted as being “school compliant” – containing more than half a day’s sugar allowance. The BMJ also highlighted the presence of three companies claiming to make healthier versions of typically HFSS foods, including healthier pizzas, roasted crisps, and low sugar jelly and whip. One of the dilemmas facing school food caterers is that items such as chocolate bars, muffins and fizzy drinks have some of the highest profit margins and sales, and are therefore seen as critical in making the economics of school food provision stack up. “They enable catering firms to make up for the losses on nutritious plated meals that are more expensive to produce and less popular,” the journal reported.
Chef’s Special
“I’ve spoken to a lot of people that see Beyond Meat’s share price tanking, hear doom and gloom stories about the plant-based category and think that consumer demand has evaporated,” wrote Matt Gibson, CEO and co-founder at alternative cheesemaker New Culture on social media recently. “The Good Food Institute’s latest [US] foodservice report shows it’s actually the opposite, demand for animal-free is growing, so long as you have a product that meets consumer expectations,” he added. The GFI report does indeed paint a more nuanced picture of the state of the plant-based category in the US – a trailblazing market for plant-based innovation. Plant-based protein sales were down 7% in value and 5% in volume sales in 2025 – a downward trend visible since the category hit its peak in 2022. Yet underneath the top line figures there are pockets of positive news. Plant-based milk was up 14% in volume in 2025 across US foodservice, growing faster than conventional milk; it also has a 13% share of the whole foodservice milk category and is still priced 72% above conventional — “people are paying more for it anyway”, noted Gibson (though this is not the case in other parts of the world currently). Plant-based cheese, by contrast, is “getting hammered”, he noted, with sales down 15% last year, something Gibson attributed to the fact “it doesn’t taste, look or function at all like cheese”. His New Culture brand claims to make animal-free dairy cheese that is “indistinguishable to conventional dairy cheese”.
Last Orders
More than two-thirds (68%) of consumers would be likely to return drinks containers during a grocery shopping trip once the UK deposit return scheme (DRS) launches in October 2027, with 55% likely to spend a deposit refund voucher in-store during the same visit. The research, based on a poll by Danone, a big player in the bottled water market with brands including Evian, Volvic and Harrogate Spring Water, suggests consumer appetite for DRS remains reasonably high. “As the UK prepares for launch, retailers and producers have an opportunity to work together to ensure the scheme is as simple and intuitive as possible from day one,” said Dan Vass, head of category and commercial strategy at Danone North Europe. That is far from straightforward given not only the complexity of the scheme but also that Wales remains an outlier, having decided to include glass in its scheme. Hopes for interoperability between the four home nations was raised this week, however, as Exchange for Change was appointed as the deposit management organisation (DMO) for Wales. That means there will be one administrator for the schemes across all four nations of the UK, with Exchange for Change already named as DMO in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Over the next few days Exchange for Change will be working with Coca-Cola Europacific Partners and Special Olympics Great Britain to trial DRS accessibility at the National Summer Games in Birmingham. Hundreds of athletes with intellectual disabilities, alongside thousands of spectators, volunteers and supporters, will have the opportunity to use reverse vending machines (RVMs) and engage with DRS in a real-world setting. Testing of machines is now underway, according to the latest Exchange for Change newsletter published this week, with the list of certified RVMs set to be available “in early October”.
