Source: Radio New Zealand
The rotten food served to students at Haeata Community Campus. Supplied / Haeata Community Campus
The food safety authority is doubling down on its assessment that rotten lunches were given to students at a Christchurch school because of “human error” by the school’s staff.
The principal of Haeata Community Campus, Peggy Burrows, has disputed that lunches served on Monday were left at the school since the previous Thursday.
She claims CCTV footage showed eight containers that hold the smaller individual meals were collected by the provider, Compass Group.
But in a statement on Wednesday afternoon, Food Safety Spokesperson Vince Arbuckle challenged this.
“The weight of evidence suggests that the contaminated food being distributed to students was a result of a human error at the school,” he said.
“We think it likely this occurred during the school’s distribution of the lunches.”
Arbuckle said the footage, which showed the number of boxes going in and out of the school, did not provide sufficient evidence that all of the leftover lunches were accounted for.
He said the CCTV footage reviewed does not show the contents of the boxes or whether they were the same boxes.
“In addition, staff at the school told us the school keeps an unknown number of boxes, which it uses to deliver food to students.
“For example, last Thursday, eight boxes were delivered, and nine were collected. Staff at the school also told us some boxes are used to deliver lunches to younger students, while some are left in the school’s cafeteria where older students can help themselves.
“Since all of the contaminated lunches were from boxes in the cafeteria, we think it most likely that some food intended for consumption last week was mistakenly made available on Monday.”
He said Food Safety were continuing to investigate what happened and were happy to work with the school on its processes.
In a statement on Wednesday evening, a spokesperson from The School Lunch Collective, which represented Compass Group, said no food was ever left in their delivery vans overnight.
“We follow robust processes with surplus meals.
“We collect the cambro boxes given to us by the school each day. They are returned to the CPK [central production kitchen] and put in our different waste management streams. We clean the cambro boxes as well as the vans that deliver the food – every day. At the end of the night, there is no food left in any of our vans or cambro boxes.
The spokesperson said MPI is continuing to investigate this incident and will verify their systems and processes.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
