Manurewa High is the school of the future: How these school lunches are reshaping food and waste culture

Stephen Smith is the man behind Manurewa Highs’ lunches. He spent 30 years
working as a chef and worked in airline catering. When I visited, it was a Friday, and
because of this, lunch was seasoned potato wedges, crispy chicken sticks with a rich
creamy tomato sauce with plenty of hidden vegetables. There was a vegan version,
also. The food being prepared that morning was a chicken tandoori wrap crammed
with vegetables and brown rice, with a smearing of a cheesy creamy combination to
add richness to the wrap. The entire space smelt incredible. In addition to 2,800
lunches across four schools, suitable meals are prepared for students going off-site
for sports days and attending trades training, for example. Menus are published
weekly on Instagram for each school. This is a big-time, in-house operation.

Stephen was at the School when we visited in 2021, but things are a little different
now. Previously, schools had a budget of $5.56 per primary student in Years 0-3,
$6.52 for Years 4-8 and $8.29 for Years 9-13. For Manurewa High students, there had always been the offering of a meal weighing in around 320g, with a snack on top, giving each student about 400g of food. Vegan and vegetarian meals are available at the same weight. Stephen and his team (which includes Year 12 and Year 13 students training in Hospitality and Catering) must now supply a lunch, meeting ministry nutrition
requirements and weighing 240 grams for $4 a head. Next year, 2026, the budget is
$4 for all schools and food prices have only gone up.

What Stephen lacks in the budget for school lunches, he makes up in passion. His priority is that these students are given healthy and delicious food. That simple. But the viewpoint is more holistic than that. Rather than using the packaging proposed by the Ministry (of Education), Stephen kept with his compostables. Manurewa High uses our sugarcane food boxes as they remain stable in the ovens and insulated boxes, and our bamboo cutlery. This packaging and any leftovers are collected in compost bins scattered across the campus, collected by Green Gorilla and composted. Any leftover meals are made available to students to take home. 

Manurewa High is thinking different. A signature aspect of why the school’s lunch programme works so incredibly well is the openness and community participation. In collaboration with Te Maara Kai o Wirihana (Maara Fresh), led by Urban Farmer Levi Brinsdon-Hall, this social enterprise is creating a truly local and authentic food system. Levi wants fruit trees everywhere so the students have that level of access. He has, alongside a small team, transformed a 1.6-acre paddock behind the school into a productive landscape assimilated into the wetland. This year, he plans to grow five tonnes each of potatoes and kūmara and more than two tonnes of cabbage. Stephen is counting on it.

We asked Stephen three questions to understand how a campus of this size was managing their waste. What is remarkable is to see a school with a limited budget prioritising renewable materials in packaging and recovery via organic collections. And beyond all this, Manurewa High is now just out there showing students the possibilities, they’re teaching them how to look for what those possibilities. 

How many students are you feeding each week? Or how many meals are you providing? 

From week 3 of term one, once enrolments settle, we will be producing the following: For Manurewa High: around 1600 meals per day and for the three primary schools estimated around 1235 total meals per day. 

What does your current waste management process look like? 

For Manurewa High, we collect food waste and packaging around the school daily at various bin stations across the campus. These materials are then placed in three large bins, which are collected three times a week by Green Gorilla and taken to their composting site. The Primary schools also use Green Gorilla for their organics— food and packaging collections. 

What have you been able to divert? Is it all food waste and compostable packaging from general waste collections or a percentage of it? If not all, what have you been able to divert? What challenges have you faced? 

I can only speak for Manurewa High, I would say we are collecting around 70% of food waste and packaging from the lunch programme to composting. The challenges we face is that of our students and staff not sorting their rubbish and placing it in the correct receptacle. We are a very big site with plenty of bin stations for general waste, recycling and compostable packaging and organics but we continue to have mixed rubbish in any one bin. Education is the key but this takes time and energy.