One of the meals. Photo: Supplied / Haeata Community Campus
The Christchurch school at the centre of a dispute about mouldy lunches served to students has launched an internal investigation.
Haeata Community Campus is at odds with New Zealand Food Safety and provider Compass Group about how mince and potato meals covered in mould came to be served to children on Monday.
Principal Peggy Burrows said she was [https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/580912/principal-says-school-not-to-blame-for-mouldy-lunches-as-authorities-review-footage dismayed by comments made by New Zealand Food Safety and Compass Group that the school was to blame, before the investigation had been completed.
Contrary to claims made by Compass, she said the school's camera footage clearly showed all food boxes, known as Cambros, were collected from the school on the previous Thursday and no food had been "left behind to sit in the sun for three days".
Burrows said the school did not retain any of the boxes, rather they were collected and returned to the Compass distribution centre at the end of each day.
She said one box that only contained rubbish was left at the school last Wednesday but was collected by Programmed Facility Management staff, which manages the property, and returned to Compass the following day.
"The Cambros are barcoded and tracked and all meals are accounted for as there are strict food safety requirements for students with dietary needs. The contaminated meals were discovered dispersed across multiple Cambros by Haeata staff. This is confirmed by the camera footage," she said.
Burrows said the school maintained robust systems at all times to ensure school lunches were safely distributed at the school and none of the systems had failed in the last week.
"The school does not accept responsibility for the operational failure of the supplier, the Compass Group, and disagrees with statements by both Mr Harbey [School Lunch Collective spokesman] and New Zealand Food Safety deputy director-general Vincent Arbuckle regarding Haeata Community Campus staff being responsible for the reheating and distribution of contaminated food," she said.
The school was committed to student safety and transparency in serving food and planned to release the findings of its own internal investigation next week.
Select committee scrutiny
The mouldy meals were raised at the Ministry for Primary Industry's annual review before the select committee on Thursday.
Ministry director-general Ray Smith said while the investigation into the meals at Haeata had not been completed, officials felt it was important to clarify their preliminary findings given public commentary on the risks posed by the meals.
"We would not have issued an interim view on it had the thing not been in the public domain in the manner it was that alarmed parents, no question about it, so we had to quickly either tell parents there's a problem with Compass and deal with Compass or suggest there's an issue at the school," he said.
Of the 300 meals delivered to the school, between 10 to 20 meals were affected.
The lunches had been delivered to 15 other schools in Christchurch on Monday.
Food Safety deputy director-general Vince Arbuckle said investigators had visited Haeata Community Campus and Compass in Christchurch several times this week as part of the investigation to determine what had happened.
"Only one school had this experience and only one part of the school had this experience, the canteen, which all adds up to suggest that somehow in the canteen some meals remained in a box, got intermingled with incoming meals on the Monday and innocently served out," he said.
"The weight of evidence suggests that the contaminated food being distributed to students was a result of a human error at the school."
The investigation was ongoing and New Zealand Food Safety was happy to work with the school on its processes, Arbuckle said.
