ISS Facility Services Education has been crowned the Education Caterer of the Year at this year’s Foodservice Catey Awards.
The awards ceremony run by The Caterer, the leading multimedia brand for the UK hospitality industry, celebrates contract catering employees across the UK and commends teams shaping the world of foodservice.
ISS UK’s Education division provides catering services to primary and secondary schools across England and is the largest Food for Life Served Here accreditation holder in its sector. They scooped the award for their commitments to providing an all-encompassing lunch service which promotes and supports healthy living and overall child wellbeing.
ISS’ Food Education Event Days (FEEDs), annual Green Fingers gardening week and pupil and parent cooking clubs are just a few examples of how the school caterers engage families and communities with the farm to fork journey.
Building on the initiatives they have introduced around food education, ISS has taken further steps to support pupil wellbeing, looking at school dining environments and considering how to make a child’s visit to their dining hall as enjoyable as possible through revisiting every aspect of our service from a child’s perspective. Subsequent service improvements have included the introduction of eco-therapy inspired wall art to create calm environments, food tasters to help with decision making and reviewing of queuing systems and plate clearing stations, to name a few.
ISS Facility Services Education’s Managing Director, Mark Davies, said:
“We are absolutely thrilled to have won a Foodservice Catey – it is an honour to have been recognised alongside the greats of the foodservice industry!
I am really proud of what our team has achieved this year. Since winning the award in 2014 we have been looking at new ways to engage pupils with healthy and nutritious school food. Through focusing on the customer journey and experiences of pupils in depth, we have been able to improve how we support schools in looking after pupil wellbeing. This is a focus which we are eager to build upon and I am really excited about how we take this forward over the coming months.”
ISS won Education Caterer of the Year at the 2014 Foodservice Cateys for their earlier work on providing healthy and sustainable school food and for launching their Green Fingers gardening week, which has now been running for the past five years.
