“It’s only good nutrition if children are eating it!”

Nine words from Arena’s Feeding the Future event that every food and drink brand selling into schools should pin above the NPD whiteboard and the Government would do well to think consider. With new school food standards for England landing in September*, here’s who wins, who loses and who needs to reformulate fast.

Kings Place, London, mid June. Arena’s Feeding the Future event has gathered the people who feed Britain’s schools, and the mood in the room sits somewhere between pride and alarm. Then Luke Consiglio, Founder and CEO of The Pantry and a national board director of The School Food People, sums up the entire debate on the new school food standards in a single line. “It’s only good nutrition if children are eating it”.

He’s right. And every food and drink brand selling into the education sector, or eyeing it up, needs to sit with that sentence for a minute. The biggest overhaul of school food in more than a decade is published this September. It will decide which products earn a place on the school menu and which disappear overnight.

A £3 billion market is being re-specified

Education rarely gets the attention that retail or restaurants enjoy. But it should. IGD figures shared at the event value the sector at £3,049 million in food and beverage sales across 47,537 outlets, serving around 1.24 billion meals a year. That is only 3% of away from home value, yet it accounts for 13% of all meals eaten out of home and 14% of outlets. Low value, high volume and, as IGD puts it, underpinned by secure long-term contracts and predictable purchasing patterns. State schools dominate, serving 932 million meals a year across more than 22,000 sites, three quarters of the sector total.

Secondary schools deserve a special mention for brands. They account for just 22% of state school sites yet half of all sales value, because older pupils choose and pay rather than simply take what they are given. It is the closest thing schools have to a high street, and it is where the new standards will bite hardest.

Volume is about to jump. From September, every child in a household receiving Universal Credit becomes eligible for a free school meal. That is more than half a million additional children and, once fully in effect, around 100 million more school meals a year, taking the sector to a forecast peak of 1.32 billion meals in 2027 before easing back as pupil numbers fall. The number of children aged 0 to 14 is forecast to drop by 7.1% by 2031, so the growth window is real but not indefinite.

All of this lands against a difficult backdrop. IGD now expects food and drink inflation to run higher than previously forecast because of the conflict in the Middle East, while average family spending power sits flat at around £255 a week. Squeezed households, squeezed schools, squeezed caterers.

What the new school food standards actually change

The new school food standards for England make healthier options mandatory, remove or restrict foods high in fat, salt and sugar, tighten the rules on drinks and dairy and introduce stronger standards and enforcement for the first time. The consultation closed on the 12^th of June and the final standards are due to be published in September 2026. Implementation is expected in primary schools and the majority of secondary schools by September 2027, with secondary schools phasing in further requirements, covering the likes of pulses and sweetened baked goods, by September 2028.

One point of clarity, because the timeline is causing confusion. Publication in September 2026 does not mean enforcement in September 2026. Schools and caterers have until September 2027 before compliance is formally checked. In practice, though, plenty of schools will want to be ahead of the game and will start implementing the new standards as soon as they are published, and caterers at the Arena event reported schools already asking what is being done about them. Suppliers who treat 2027 as the deadline for getting ready will find their competitors sitting in the meetings that matter a full year earlier.

The reasons are hard to argue with. Around one in three children leaves primary school overweight or obese, sugar intakes remain well above recommended levels and compliance with the existing standards has been inconsistent, which is exactly why enforcement is coming. Nobody at the Arena event disputed the ambition. Tracey Smith of Sodexo recalled the last big standards change as a huge operational shift, “but it was the right thing to do”.

There is a second September deadline too. Benedict’s Law requires every school in England to hold spare adrenaline pens, train all staff in allergy response and publish a whole school allergy policy from this autumn. The compliance bar for anyone supplying schools just rose across the board.

Suppliers will fall into three camps

Locked out. If your range leans on sugary bakery, confectionery, desserts or anything the HFSS restrictions catch, some school listings will simply end. Luke was blunt and sympathetic in equal measure, warning that some long-standing suppliers will watch their school business shrink year after year. For those brands the honest answer is to redeploy into workplace, leisure and other foodservice channels rather than fight a specification they cannot meet.

Selling with the grain. Brands built on wholegrains, beans and pulses, fruit and vegetables, higher fibre bakery and lower sugar dairy suddenly hold the strongest selling story in the sector. The standards are, in effect, free advocacy for your category. Get in front of caterers now, because menus for September 2027 are already being planned.

Reformulate to stay. In between sit hundreds of products that can keep their place through intelligent reformulation. Caterers at the event described already asking bread suppliers how white loaves will clear the new fibre threshold, while one national education caterer has cut added sugar in its desserts by around two thirds. The panel’s plea was to start those conversations early, share reformulation plans openly and, above all, keep making food children actually want. Compliant but left uneaten on a plate helps nobody.

The panel’s other asks were refreshingly practical. Visit schools and watch a secondary lunch rush before you pitch. Be transparent on allergens, avoid adding unnecessary ones and give caterers early warning of recipe changes. Bring products that reduce kitchen labour rather than add to it. And offer up insight on uptake, waste and cost, not just a price list.

Contract caterers are the pressure point

Here is the uncomfortable truth. School catering is roughly a 4% margin business. In the pilots of the proposed standards, understood to involve only 11 schools, caterers reported meal uptake falling by around 15% while food costs rose. Replicate that across 22,000 state school sites and, as Luke told the room, the maths becomes catastrophic for the industry.

Funding does not close the gap. England’s free school meal rate rises just 2% this September, from £2.61 to £2.66 per meal. The Pantry’s own graphic, shared in the IGD deck, makes the point that school meal funding in the United Kingdom is anything but united: £3.40 in Wales, £3.30 in Scotland and £3.10 in Northern Ireland, with England bottom of the pile. The Food Foundation puts the true cost of a school meal at £3.16. Six school catering providers, four of them local authority services, have already announced they will cease trading at the end of this academic year. Nobody on the panel used the word insolvency, but everybody was thinking it. Expect consolidation, harder price negotiations and a flight towards suppliers who genuinely help caterers protect margin and uptake.

Pupils and parents hold the final vote

Schools now have to sell the change to two sceptical audiences. In the pilots, parents pushed back when familiar dishes vanished from menus. Secondary pupils, meanwhile, are the most mobile customers in foodservice. If the school offer stops appealing, the corner shop, the chicken shop and the meal deal are a ten-minute walk away, and they do not follow any nutritional standards at all!

Then there is the lunchbox. Roughly one in three primary children brings a packed lunch, and nothing in the new standards touches it. A caterer can spend months building a fully compliant menu and still watch a pupil at the next table open a box of crisps and chocolate. As Luke asked, how is that a level playing field?

One meal a day was never a silver bullet

The government has hung these reforms on Keir Starmer’s pledge to raise the healthiest generation of children ever something Andy Burnham is doubtless keen to uphold but will he listen to those who understand how this is going to impact the sector – time will tell.

It is a fine ambition and school food is a fair place to start. But a school lunch is one meal a day, 190 days a year. The policy says little about evenings, weekends and 13 weeks of holidays, and nothing about what gets eaten on the walk home. Children who reject the canteen do not stop eating. They buy whatever is cheap, fast and tasty elsewhere, and the calories simply migrate to the places nobody is measuring.

That was the panel’s real challenge to ministers. Where is the whole child food policy? Japan and France treat children’s food as culture, not just catering, and it shows in their outcomes. Standards, funding and food education for pupils and parents have to move together. Otherwise, we risk designing the healthiest school meal in Europe and then seeing the children eating somewhere else or defaulting to lunchboxes full of all the foods we don’t want them eating.

September is closer than it looks

Whatever the final wording of the standards, the direction is set. Menus will change, specifications will tighten and the suppliers who thrive will be the ones who make caterers’ lives easier and children’s plates fuller. Luke’s line deserves the last word because it doubles as a commercial strategy. It’s only good nutrition if children are eating it. Make food that kids genuinely want, prove it complies and there is a market of 1.3 billion meals waiting for you.

jellybean has spent almost 40 years helping food and drink brands win in the education sector and the wider foodservice market. If schools are part of your growth plan, talk to us before September.