Complaint made about flies found in school lunch

NZ Food Safety has received a complaint about flies being found in a meal provided by the Government's school lunch programme.

The government ministry's deputy general Vincent Arbuckle confirmed to 1News that it had "received a complaint about flies in school lunches".

"We are working with the Ministry of Education in the first stages of looking into this complaint to establish the facts."

Substack blogger Emily Writes spoke to a source with a family member at a school who claimed the child opened their school lunch yesterday, "and a couple of flies came out".

"We don’t know where the flies are from. Some schools have meals coming from Australia – what if something gets through?"

Sean Teddy, hautū operations and integration at the Ministry of Education said: "We are aware of a complaint.

"The Ministry is working with NZ Food Safety, who are looking into the matter to establish the facts.

"However, given that the meal was heated for 25 minutes in a commercial oven and then transported to schools in specially insulated delivery boxes to keep them hot, we do think it is unlikely that a fly flew out of a packaged meal."

The claim follows a raft of issues experienced by the revamped programme since its launch. Some schools have complained about meals arriving late, or even not at all.

Other schools have complained about "frozen" and "burnt" school lunches with plastic melted into its contents, with many children opting to skip on the meals entirely. One Gisborne school has been feeding the lunches to their pet pig.

"Every day, they're all coming up to line up and throw it away 'cause they're not into it," one Nūhaka School teacher told 1News on Tuesday.

An investigation by multiple agencies was launched last week after a Gisborne student was reportedly burnt by one of the lunches.

One of the scheme's three main providers, Libelle – which provided around 125,000 meals a day – went into liquidation on Tuesday. Yesterday, Libelle agreed to sell its lunch operation to Compass Group NZ, the main lunch provider.

Associate Education Minister David Seymour, who is behind the programme, met with Education Minister Erica Stanford on Wednesday to discuss "a range of issues around the school lunch programme and how it's getting better and what our plan to do that is".