School Kitchen is a new takeaway food model that aims to support local communities, provide great tasting food from around the world and prioritise sustainability. By partnering with local schools, School Kitchen uses their kitchens when the schools aren’t using them and runs home delivery takeaway restaurants from them.
Guests were served Sri Lankan, Mexican, Thai and Spanish food from the first four restaurants launched by School Kitchen. The launch event took place in the school canteen of Carr Junior School, which is the first location of the new enterprise.
School Kitchen works with local chefs from diverse culinary backgrounds to run multiple restaurants from each school kitchen.
Nicholson commented: “It was great to be able to showcase the essence of School Kitchen and have people tasting the food. We’re so excited for people to be able to order from us and experience everything we have to offer. We hope this is just the beginning.”
The initiative also runs free demonstrations and cookery classes for school pupils. School Kitchens runs an apprenticeship scheme for recent school leavers in the area and ensures all staff (including chefs and delivery riders) are fairly employed, with no zero hours contracts and no commission-only earnings.
Sustainability is an important part of their work as School Kitchens installs solar panels at the schools they work with to cover all the energy usage as well as only using bicycles and electric mopeds for all deliveries.
School Kitchens ensures that all packaging is recyclable, reusable, or compostable. The School Kitchen team focusses on sourcing ingredients from local farmers and suppliers whenever possible.