Photo: RNZ / Marika Khabazi
A menu of mishaps means the government's school lunch provider is now facing new performance measures - including providing daily evidence of what it is serving up.
Food Safety New Zealand is investigating the revamped lunch programme after a Gisborne student received second-degree burns from a Wattie's cottage pie meal that splashed on his leg.
The agency has ordered the School Lunch Collective, run by international company Compass Group, to immediately stop serving the pre-made meals.
Multiple schools have described issues with burning hot plastic packaged meals - including one school using rubber gardening gloves to handle them - with more than one report of plastic in the food.
The Ministry of Education told Checkpoint that given the concerns about service level and performance, it was in the process of bringing forward some of the collective's performance reporting requirements.
It also told the lunch provider to publish daily visual evidence of the quality of the meals, delivery times and waste.
A new week brought a new menu from the School Lunch Collective for Gisborne's Ilminster Intermediate School - Wattie's meals were out and instead it was Thai Jungle Curry for lunch.
Principal Jonathan Poole was grateful the lunches were arriving in a new safer tin foil packaging, but he said the way the lunches were heated was still problematic.
"We've got these national guidelines for heating food, but the distance between our context and where the food is heated in Gisborne is a short distance, so it doesn't really have the cooling time of other regions.
"I feel like there needs to be almost like a regional approach for that and we need to have different guidelines for the regions."
The heat of the meals is of particular concern to Poole, because it was one of his students that got the second degree burns when a cottage pie proved too hot to handle.
The student had to drop it, and the scolding hot food then spilled onto his leg.
Poole said the student has been walking around with a limp.
"They were still a little bit shaken he came to school on Friday, which was cool, showed the resilience of the young man... no one expects a phone call to say: 'hey, your child's been burnt at school'."
An officer from New Zealand Food Safety visited the facility which heated those lunches on Friday.
The Ministry of Education then instructed Compass Group not to serve these particular types of packaged meals again in the programme - it said they were never intended to be reheated in a commercial oven.
The Wattie's plastic packaging was also an issue for Haeta school in Wainoni in eastern Christchurch.
But even before then, principal Peggy Burrows said they were having issues with the temperature of the meals.
"It's because they are made somewhere else and then flown into Christchurch, and then they're almost nuked when they get to wherever.
"If you happen to be the first school on the delivery chain, which I think we are because we get our lunches at 9:30am, they are really hot.
"They don't cool down rapidly enough so, by the time they get to the children, they are too hot to handle."
On the menu on Monday was beef bolognese with penne pasta.
Burrows said Haeata school was grateful for the lunches, but issues needed to be sorted as soon as possible, as more and more students were turning them down.
"Normally what we would do is if we had leftovers if children were absent from school, we would let parents pick it up at drop off and pick up.
"Nobody wants to take this home because it's just not palatable."
With the school term moving past the halfway mark, Burrows was keen to get the issues sorted quickly.
"Yes, it's nice that they've apologised and that's all they can do really, but they need to get it right."
Poole was also hoping a corner has been turned.
"The minister, you know, he spoke to me on the phone and he said, you know, there are kinks in the system and he's aware of that.
"He said we are trying to be better and trying to make improvements, so hopefully this is the start of the improvement, we shouldn't have had that incident to tick start that change."
The School Lunch Collective, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Primary Industries all declined Checkpoint's requests to be interviewed on Monday.
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