Children attending the on-site nursery at Airedale Hospital are getting nutritious and delicious new meals as a result of a new partnership.
The AGH Solutions Catering Team has partnered with The Healthy Food Company, which specialises in providing children with handmade food, developed with a paediatric dietitian, which has no added salt or sugar.
Nightingales Day Nursery is located on the Steeton site and can be used by parents, grandparents and other family members working at Airedale Hospital.
Speaking about the new partnership, Gareth Williams, Head of Patient Meal Services, said: “We are always striving to develop our service further and make it suitable and enjoyable for all our service users.
“We set out to improve our food provision for nursery children and, following extensive research, we found The Healthy Food Company who had the ethos of what we wanted to achieve – delivering a healthy choice of appetising meals that are more sustainable and meet nutritional requirements.”
Kay Shearing, Founder of the Healthy Food Company said: “Parents and guardians trust nurseries to keep their children safe, educated and build their independence. It’s also important that their nutritional needs are being met during this important time in their lives.
“By serving The Healthy Food Company meals, Airedale is making a huge contribution towards meeting the nutritional needs of children in their care.”
Some of the new meals include sweet potato and spinach curry, chicken casserole, vegetable moussaka and a roast turkey dinner. The new menu was implemented following positive feedback from parents, service users and colleagues from across the Trust and nursery.
Gareth said: “After we reached out to The Healthy Food Company, they delivered a food sampling session which was met with excellent feedback.
“The company have worked closely with us throughout the transition to the new menu which has been hugely beneficial in terms of engagement with the nursery children and staff.
“We’re seeing more and more empty plates coming back which has been fantastic!”
Vicky Yates, Childcare Provision Manager at Nightingales Day Nursery said: “As a nursery, we strive to provide our children with healthy, nutritious food so we are pleased to be working with the Healthy Food Company. The children are loving putting the new food to the taste test!”
In March 2022, the Trust launched its ambitious Green Plan which set out its response to tackling climate change. Some of these actions centred upon making the food provision at Airedale more sustainable. The Healthy Food Company are proud to support British farmers and only source meat and poultry from British sources. All of their fish is MSC certified and they never use palm oil in their products.
Following the success of the Nursery menu rollout, the Catering team is hoping to introduce this to inpatients staying on the children’s ward. Gareth said: “We are excited to see how this partnership develops and we have future plans to include Ward 17.
“We look forward to seeing the positive impact on our overall food service but, most importantly, on our service users’ mealtime experience.”
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