Thank you so much to all of our nurseries who completed the recent Insight6 Menu Feedback Survey for our current Autumn/Winter Menu.

As you know, this current menu really focuses on going above and beyond current Government Guidance for Menus for Early Years Settings and we are really proud of what we have achieved in creating menus that enable our nurseries to exceed in early years nutrition.

It is also vitally important that children enjoy their mealtimes at nursery and the food that is served up! So, we really are grateful for all of your feedback – positive or otherwise – as it helps us to ensure that we tailor our meals so that they are both high quality in terms of nutritional value AND enjoyed by the children we are catering for.

The current menu has been very ambitious and has seen quite a few changes in terms of moving away from sweeter desserts on both our lunch and tea menus and we have introduced a range of new second courses. We were really pleased to hear from so many of you that your children have been enjoying the majority of the new dishes:

‘Generally our children seem to enjoy the majority of meals provided by Zebedees and this has continued into the Autumn/Winter Menu. The vanilla sauce has also seemed to be a good change from the usual custard.’

 ‘It is a really varied menu and gives the children so much opportunity to try new foods that are healthy and balanced.’

 ‘Overall the menu is great, we have found there is an improved taste in food and overall children eat well with the variety that is offered.’

We know that for some of the children, the unfamiliarity of the new dishes has been a challenge and we thank nursery staff for encouraging them to give the new dishes a go!  If you have children at your setting that generally find trying new foods tricky, you can find some useful tips here in the latest blog from our Nutritionist, Charlotte Stirling-Reed. This blog focuses specifically on helping children to try new foods at nursery.

We have shared your feedback with Charlotte, and she is keen to make sure that all of your helpful feedback is incorporated into our next menu:

"Thank you all for your feedback on the menus so far. It's been so insightful to see what's worked and what aspects we need to work on going forward too. One of the reasons I love working with Zebedees is because they are so great at evolving and trying their best to take feedback on board and make positive changes for the future. I'm really looking forward to working on the next set of menus and trying all of Brendan's delicious recipes again too! We're so pleased to be going above and beyond Government Standards for foods served at nursery settings and we aim to continue this whilst taking on a lot of your great feedback! " Charlotte

Our Insight6 survey system allows us to analyse your feedback in a way we have not been able to before and we now have a better than ever understanding as to what is important to our nurseries and are using this data to inform our next set of menus (that we have already started work on!). The new Spring/Summer 2022 menus will focus on dishes that we know the children really love to eat, whilst making sure that we are still providing variety and a balanced diet across the day and week.

We are also making some tweaks to our current Autumn/Winter menu based on the feedback we have received and will be writing directly to nurseries with more information on this soon.

If you ran out of time to complete the survey, but had any specific feedback that you wanted to share with us, we would still love to hear from you. Please drop an email to clientservices@zebedees.co.uk with any feedback you would like to share. Thank you!