We LOVE talking about nurseries and everything food for the early years!

We preserve our meals in the same way as you do at home, only with a few more controls. Our pre-prepared meals are cooked to a ‘just done’ state, are quickly chilled (down to 3˚C in less than 90 mins) and then held under tightly controlled temperature conditions. This ensures our meals are safe for children and maintains the nutritional and sensory quality of our ingredients.

Great cooks are hard to come by and even harder to keep in a nursery all-year round. Holidays, sickness, and other absences put tremendous pressure on nurseries, making it hard to provide children with consistently healthy and tasty meals, and taking the nursery team away from their primary focus – the children. Partnering with Nursery Kitchen enables nurseries to consistently serve nutritious and delicious meals and snacks with ease. It also provides nurseries with access to fresher and better ingredients, rigorous allergen control measures, advanced nutritional data, and technical oversight. Nursery Kitchen also has a dedicated Food Innovation team who design every dish specially for young children.

Even the best cooks often don’t have a detailed understanding of nutritional planning, allergen control and food safety. Most nurseries only have one cook, so for at least 20 days a year the nursery requires kitchen cover, which is often the nursery manager or team. Partnering with Nursery Kitchen ensures you always have delicious, nutritious, and safe meals for your nursery.

Correct cooking and cooling of food kills and controls harmful bacteria and microorganisms and makes food safe to eat. The loss of some nutrients is inevitable in the cooking and cold storage of food. However, our strict procedures minimise any nutritional loss. The nutrient content of any food at the point of consumption is governed by:

• The quality and range of raw ingredients – We use a wide range of high quality, ingredients, to ensure our meals are extremely nutritious.
• The parameters on cooking, cooling, storage and serving – We cook and cool our ingredients rapidly, in small batches, which minimises any nutritional loss. Dishes are served immediately after cooking in the nursery so there is no nutritional loss from hot holding of food.

Vitamin C within fresh vegetables is known to be particularly unstable and sensitive to cooking and cooling. Our strict controls ensure that the vegetables in our dishes contribute major portions of vitamin C, even up to one fifth of a child’s RDA. This is supported by major vitamin C contributions from our range of fresh fruit and vegetables, particularly fruits such as oranges, pineapple, and melons.