Last week saw Wirral Met College culinary arts and hospitality students preparing over 200 healthy lunches as part of a healthy eating initiative launched in collaboration with Magenta Living.
Everyday the students put together packed lunches containing fruit, water, juice, nutritious sandwiches and wraps, oat and sultana cookies, and cranberry and macadamia muffins for Magenta Living’s Building Services Technicians, Apprentices and Environmental Services Team to encourage healthy eating.
The lunch packs also contained nutritional and allergen information and were ready for collection by 10am each day.
‘Healthy lunches’ is the first initiative to be delivered with the Culinary Arts students post COVID as part of the ongoing collaboration with Magenta Living. Plans are currently being developed to host team-building sessions in the training kitchen on campus too.
Talking about the initiative Tony Boustead, Curriculum Manager for Hospitality and Catering said: “We provided Magenta with a list of suggested healthy items that could be included in the healthy lunch box.
“Magenta then selected items from the list and provided us with numbers required – approximately 40 lunches every day this week. The students have worked phenomenally hard and learned so much from this experience.”
Max Elliott, a Level 3 Diploma in Professional Cookery student at Wirral Met College said: “It was a privilege to cater for staff at Magenta with our healthy packed lunches as they do very important work within our community providing housing for people who need it the most.”
Haydn Hansford, Building Services Director at Magenta Living said: “Magenta Living recognises how important it is to maintain colleague’s health and wellbeing by supporting initiatives such as ‘Healthy Eating Week’, organised by the British Nutrition Foundation.
“Part of this was to provide a healthy packed lunch to colleagues who work mainly out and about within our neighbourhoods in customers’ homes. We approached Wirral Met College as one of our key partners to provide the healthy packed lunch, which they did. We had lots of positive feedback from colleagues who really appreciated the healthy lunch and said it was much appreciated, very fresh and tasty.”
Sue Higginson, Principal at Wirral Met College said: “This is excellent work and demonstrates our community links, our understanding of healthy nutrition and partnership working. All whilst working with our students to provide great work experience.
“The on-going partnership provided an opportunity for students to understand the importance of citizenship working with a local employer, who is a key player within Wirral communities.”
Magenta Living’s Karen John, Apprentice and Workplace Advisor, said: “As part of Healthy Eating Week we worked in collaboration with the Catering students at Wirral Met College, to provide healthy packed lunches for all our Building Services Technicians, Apprentices and Environmental Services team.
“The packed lunches went down a storm, I was over at the College on Wednesday and caught up with some of our technicians and apprentices who all gave fantastic reviews and really enjoyed their packed lunches from the college and said that the catering students had done an excellent job. A big thank you to everyone who was involved, with special thanks to our designated drivers for distributing. We are very much looking forward to working with the students again in the near future.”
Michelle McGunigall, Mobile Cleaner at Magenta Living said: "Everybody was delighted to receive a free healthy lunch, it just what we needed on a hot day like today. Everything was really fresh and it was very tasty. Thank you to everyone who was involved!”
