Principal says school not to blame for mouldy lunches as authorities review footage

The food safety regulator says it's seen CCTV footage from a Christchurch school, which shows that mouldy lunches were served to students because of a mix up that can't be blamed on the company providing the meals.

Haeata Community Campus principal Peggy Burrows says the footage shows the school was not at fault, as it shows the same number of boxes being delivered and taken away on Monday, but Food Safety officials say they have seen the footage and disagree.

Officials and the school remain at odds over how mouldy meals came to be served to children alongside fresh ones on Monday.

The regulator is part of the Ministry for Primary Industries and the Ministry's director-general Ray Smith said an investigation into the meals was ongoing.

He said it had moved quickly in order to address public concerns over food safety, with evidence so far showing the problem had occurred at the school, not at the provider, Compass Group NZ.

"[Our] view is that there's been a problem at the school with distribution of these things, and we can work with them to help that. Remember, these lunches went to 15 other schools. There's parents too with children that are receiving these lunches. People need to know that these lunches are safe to eat, and we think that they are."

Principal confident school is not to blame

The school's principal Peggy Burrows said there's no way the mix-up had occurred at the school, as the provider was contracted to prepare, deliver and pick up any leftover school lunches.

Large boxes, known as Cambros, which each hold around 40 meals, are used to keep lunches hot and transport them to schools, with the rubbish then taken away in them.

Burrows said CCTV footage shows there were no meals left at the campus over the weekend, and the school does not keep spare boxes onsite, despite investigators saying so.

But she is unable to share the images despite wanting to, due an agreement with Programmed Facility Management, who look after the campus. Its policy does not allow unauthorised viewing of CCTV footage and says staff are not permitted to take screenshots, or they may face disciplinary action.

Burrows said Compass Group holds a contract to safely prepare meals, deliver them and pick up any leftovers, and the school's responsible for distributing the meals to students.

She said each day, a Compass driver arrived in a van and delivered the Cambro boxes to the cafe where lunch staff went through them to take out the special meals (halal, vegetarian etc) and put them into one Cambro box then deliver them to students. The boxes were then all returned to the cafe, before being collected by the driver.

"You can see in our video footage, the driver is bending over on the table. He's got a sheet in front of him and he's ticking off everything. He puts all of those Cambros back onto his trolley and then he takes them out of the building. If he had a concern that something was missing, would he not then have alerted the school so that we could have assisted him to go and find it so he could take it off site?"

Burrows said the issue of a missing box on Thursday was not brought to her attention that day.

"Our pushback would be, if there is an error with something being left behind and we dispute that but if there was, under their contract they need to resolve that with us immediately and they did not."

She said any leftover Cambro boxes were collected by the Programmed Facility Management staff who do an interior and exterior sweep of the facility, twice a day and taken to the designated rubbish area.

"There's no way you could confuse a Cambro with one that would have fresh food in it because it's put in the area of the cafe where the cleaners and caretakers put rubbish ready for disposal."

Government officials face questions about school lunch saga

During the Ministry for Primary Industry's annual review before the select committee on Thursday, Green MP Steve Abel told officials it was appalling that school children were being fed mouldy mincemeat as part of a government school lunch programme.

Food Safety deputy director-general Vince Arbuckle said investigators had visited Haeata Community Campus and Compass in Christchurch this week to work out what had happened.

He said it would have taken several days at the right temperature for the meals to get to the state they were seen in on Monday.

He said the school was served the same menu last Thursday and again on Monday. There was no school on Friday as it was a teacher only day.

On Tuesday, investigators watched the CCTV footage and recorded what they saw.

"We are confident in the numbers, we saw eight boxes coming into the school and nine boxes leaving on the Monday.

"What we also became aware of is that the school retains several other boxes for various purposes and we think that's probably what's happened and caused the confusion."

Of the 300 meals delivered to the school, between 10 to 20 meals were affected.

The lunches had been delivered to 15 other schools in Christchurch on Monday.

"Only one school had this experience and only one part of the school had this experience, the canteen, which all adds up to suggest that somehow in the canteen some meals remained in a box got intermingled with incoming meals on the Monday and innocently served out."

Arbuckle said in terms of food safety risk, mould was "hugely unpleasant, but unlikely to be poisonous" but if there was bacteria present, that would be a different matter.

Food Safety had retained a number of the meals and would be testing them.

Arbuckle said investigators were still working through the temperature issue, to see if it was possible the meals delivered on Thursday, would still have been lukewarm on Monday.

"Possibly yes, possibly not."

He said the lunch provider and the school had a shared responsibility to manage the distribution of the lunches and the collection and disposal of any uneaten lunches.

"Compass doesn't control what the school does and how the school distributes the lunches, each school does that subtly differently depending on their resources and their number of students."

He said there were lessons to learn from this, with findings and recommendations to come of the investigation.

"One of them may well be that we encourage education to work with schools to get better processes, to make sure that there is an absolute correlation between what goes in and what goes out and more certainty around how those meals are looked after during the course of time."

Investigation into cause of mouldy meals ongoing

MPI director-general Ray Smith said while the investigation into the meals at Haeata had not been completed, officials felt it was important to clarify their preliminary findings given there had been public commentary around the risks posed by the meals.

"We would not have issued an interim view on it had the thing not been in the public domain in the manner it was that alarmed parents, no question about it. So we had to quickly either tell parents there's a problem with Compass and deal with Compass or suggest there's an issue at the school."

He said they had not been approached by the school after the mouldy meals were discovered, but learnt about it after receiving media enquiries.

"If a school's worried or finds something, let us know and then we can get in there straight away and try and help sort it out."

The Healthy School Lunches Programme feeds 75,000 kids a day, five days a week across over 400 schools. Smith said in the year to date it had received 86 complaints, which had resulted in 49 investigations.

Smith said Compass were a global business doing its "level best" to provide healthy lunches.

"We've worked really hard with them to lift their game. What we have seen in the last term is a significant drop off in complaints and issues. I think we've got about seven in this term, year to date."

Smith said the organisation would continue to have an open mind as it worked through the investigation.

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