Changes to the Healthy School Lunches Programme have saved money, but the Ministry of Education is not able to clearly show whether the programme is delivering the outcomes it set out to achieve, an Auditor-General’s inquiry has found.
“To demonstrate value for money, the Ministry needs to be able to show what the programme is achieving, as well as how much it saves,” says Assistant Auditor-General Melanie Webb.
The Ka Ora, Ka Ako Healthy School Lunches Programme has provided lunches for more than 200,000 students a day since its introduction in 2020. In 2024, Cabinet approved a new model aimed at reducing costs, waste, and surplus lunches. The Ministry later contracted the School Lunch Collective to deliver this new model from January 2025.
In 2025, the Auditor-General opened an inquiry into the programme, looking at how the Ministry developed options, procured suppliers, put the contract in place, and monitored performance. The inquiry does not comment on the policy decisions behind the new model.
The Audit Office’s report, published today, found that the model’s scope and price continued to change while the Ministry was engaging with the market for potential suppliers, negotiating with them, and even after the contract had been signed. This created concerns about fairness, especially for suppliers that withdrew after deciding they could not deliver the model for the $3 per student price signalled to the market.
The Ministry’s selection of a single supplier for the programme also created a risk the Ministry did not manage properly.
“Our work found that the Ministry’s back-up planning was inadequate for a programme of this size and risk, and supplier problems materialised early in the rollout,” Ms Webb says.
The report notes that in 2025 the programme was delivered for about $130 million less than the previous school lunch model. However, the report highlights that the Ministry did not have robust measures to manage important aspects of performance, such as levels of surplus, waste, and nutrition.
“We encourage the Ministry to consider how it measures and reports the overall value for money of the school lunches programme,” says Melanie Webb.
“This includes being able to show how much it costs and what savings have been made, but, as importantly, how well the programme is meeting its intended outcomes.”
The Ministry has told the Audit Office that it has recently made improvements to its procurement and contract management practices for 2026 and beyond.
ENDS