A message from our founder...

Dear Families, School Council Members, School Administrators and Staff:

At the Lunch Lady Group, we are very excited about the new Healthy School Food and Beverage Act in Ontario. We would like to take this opportunity to assure you that the Lunch Lady is fully PPM150 compliant and is a big supporter of the Act and ones similar to throughout the country. Across Canada, our meals have always abided by strict nutritional standards. Adopting PPM150 has just taken a little tweaking to account for some unique elements of the legislation and our meals have been fully compliant since September 2010.

In 2009 when legislation was introduced to ban industrial transfat from school food, the Lunch Lady made a submission to the Ontario government encouraging them to go further and provide additional nutritional guidelines for school food. As a result, we were honoured to be invited to participate in the development of the new legislation by serving on one of the Healthy Menus Writing Teams set up by the Ministry of Education in October of 2009.

The requirements are strict, it is true, and sometimes they present challenges to food providers but at the end of the day, we feel they have been introduced with the best interests of Ontario’s children at heart and we are happy to abide by them. We believe that schools do educate by the choices they offer and that most parents appreciate the introduction of regulations that will limit the amount of nutrient empty foods available for sale at school.

We conducted our own survey in October 2010 and of the 12,000 parents who responded, 75% were in favour of the government regulation of food at school. That’s pretty amazing and encouraging!

For our part, the Lunch Lady will continue to strive to create menus that are interesting, healthy and yummy for the students at your school as our business grows. Now in our 18th year, the Lunch Lady delivers her good hot lunch program to students in over 900 schools and every day we learn something new about how to improve and enhance our programs to better serve school communities.

Sincerely,

Ruthie Burd

President and Founder

To view the School Food and Beverage Policy Click Here. For more information on the School Food and Beverage Policy and the work that the Lunch Lady is doing to ensure compliance, please feel free to contact your local Lunch Lady or our national head office at info@thelunchlady.ca or 1-800-603-6656.