SHIFT | The Healthy Lunch Kitchen.
The SHIFT Healthy Lunch Kitchen is a social enterprise that is ‘reimagining’ school lunches with school communities.
The Healthy Lunch Kitchen commenced in March 2021, in just its first 12 weeks has served over 70% of the school community nutritious and affordable meals per week.
The kitchen commenced in March 2021, experienced lots of stoppages over the year due to ongoing COVID lockdowns but still managed to develop as a prototype social enterprise for delivery of affordable and nutritious school lunches for the community. The Kitchen is already scaling to 5 schools in the Hepburn Shire in Victoria and is showing promise as a new way to deliver sustainable school lunches and build a local healthy food system.
As the Healthy Lunch kitchen scales-up to provide lunches to other schools within the shire, and also to offer lunches and produce to a wider community base, we will require a larger commercial kitchen space.
This big vision is of a larger Healthy Lunch Kitchen operating out of a purpose-built facility which also contains fish and vegetable production via aquaponics, and is powered by organic food matter into biogas.
The entire SHIFT enterprise then becomes a place for agriculture, aquaculture, and commercial cooking, learning and training. This will bring enormous economic and social benefits to communities searching for bold interventions that impact their very fabric and quality of life.
Farmers will receive fair prices for their produce and we will open new sales channels for them that are local and sustainable. Fresh and affordable produce boxes will be developed for families.
SHIFT will create new jobs, reduce waste and food miles, establish new learning pathways and job opportunities for youth, and educate about healthier food choices and accessibility, all while ensuring that every school student has access to a healthy, nutritious lunch during the school day.
Demand is increasing, and other schools are already registering their interest to come on board.
Thanks to our donors, sponsors and corporate partners.
The SHIFT Healthy Lunch Kitchen would not be possible without the support of our generous donors, supporters and corporate partners.
If you would like to support the continued development and implementation of the SHIFT Healthy Lunch Kitchen please see our fundraising page or contact us.
We would like to acknowledge and give special thanks to local supporters who are helping bring the Healthy Lunch Kitchen to life via their kind donations of kitchen equipment, produce and funding.