The Green Party has promised to tear up the Government’s cut-price school lunch model and rebuild the programme around schools and local suppliers, in an election policy released on Thursday that would lift the money spent on each meal from about $3.60 back to $6.50.
Co-leader Marama Davidson announced the policy on 20 August. It would restore Ka Ora, Ka Ako in the shape it took under the previous Labour government, with lunches made by schools themselves or by local providers rather than by a single national contractor. It would expand the programme to roughly 400 more schools, and it would be funded permanently instead of being renewed a year at a time.
The party says the expansion would put a lunch in front of about 150,000 more children every school day. Schools with an Equity Index score above 450 would be brought into the scheme, RNZ reported, widening it well beyond the quarter of schools facing the greatest socio-economic barriers that the original programme was built for.
“School lunches are about more than food. They are about investing in our children’s futures, creating local jobs and supporting local food producers,” Davidson said in the party’s announcement. “We know that our tamariki learn better when they are well fed.”
She was blunt about the current model. “Slashing the school lunch programme’s funding and removing contracts from local providers cost New Zealanders hundreds of local jobs, left half of meals failing minimum nutritional standards and increased food waste. The cut-price programme doesn’t even have secure funding beyond 2028,” she said.
“The goal of a school lunch programme should be providing nutritious school lunches to children, not exploiting Government contracts to prioritise profits and overseas shareholders over our tamariki.”
The money involved is not small. The Greens have costed the policy at $472 million in 2027/28, rising to $602 million by 2030/31. That is roughly double what the Government is currently spending. In this year’s Budget the Government committed $212.4 million to keep the existing programme running through 2027, and Associate Education Minister David Seymour has said changes are likely for 2028 and beyond.
The Greens argue the extra spending buys more than food. Restoring local provision would bring back up to 2,000 jobs, the party estimates, and the expansion would create up to 1,900 more. Davidson framed the cost as a choice about the tax system rather than a spending problem. “We can afford to feed our children nutritious kai and put money back into our local communities. We can afford all of this and more with a fair tax system, for all of us,” she said. The school lunch pledge is one piece of a wider affordable food policy the party says it will release in full next month.
Seymour, who redesigned the programme after ACT secured a commitment in its coalition agreement with National to make it more cost-effective, has consistently defended the savings. He said in May that the programme had delivered more than 48 million meals to over 1,000 schools since the start of Term 1 in 2025, and that by the end of 2027 it is expected to save about $360 million compared with the way Labour funded it.
“The Programme continues to improve. After fixing some teething issues, the Programme now delivers a good service. On time delivery is almost 100 per cent every day and complaints have fallen by over 92 per cent. We are getting the same results as the old programme, but cheaper,” he said in comments reported by 1News.
Whether the results really are the same is the part that has proved hardest to settle. The Auditor-General’s inquiry, tabled in Parliament at the end of June, found the Ministry of Education could not show the programme was delivering value for money because it was saving money without meeting the other goals it had set for itself. Between May and December 2025, just over half of the meals assessed by the ministry complied with the nutrition standards. A single waste survey in term three of 2025 measured 8.82kg of waste for every 100 lunches against a target of 7kg or less, and surplus meals had risen to 17 per cent in 2026 against a target of 10 per cent or lower, The Spinoff reported from the inquiry.
Seymour rejected the framing at the time, saying the Audit Office “favoured process over outcomes, and the disgruntled over reality” and that the report acted as “a rear-view mirror, telling us what we already knew”. He accepted there was a problem with surplus meals and said work was under way to bring it down, including better menu variety and quality.
The programme has had a rough three years by any measure. It was renamed Healthy School Lunches last October. Its main supplier, Libelle, went into liquidation in March 2025, and the early months brought late deliveries, complaints about meal quality and a string of unhappy headlines that Seymour put down to teething problems.
What the Greens are proposing is not a tweak to that system but a reversal of it, and the argument now heading into the campaign is a straightforward one about what a school lunch is for. The Government’s case is that a cheaper meal that arrives on time does the job. The Greens’ case is that the cheaper meal has quietly shifted costs onto nutrition, waste and local employment, and that the savings look less impressive once those are counted.
Voters will get to settle it in November. If you want to see where the parties actually sit on this and other issues before you vote, our voting tool compares their positions side by side.
What do you think, should school lunches be made locally at $6.50 a meal, or is the cheaper national contract good enough? Leave a comment below and tell us how it is working at your local school.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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