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Meet the Passion Behind Kindred's Accredited Menus
Sarah Tayler is a Senior Nursery Manager at our Kindred Hainault nursery and has over 18 years childcare experience. She has always been incredibly passionate about children's nutrition. Find out more about the journey she took to create our yummy and nutritious Kindred menus.
What were your main aims when developing Kindred's new menus?
As our Kindred family grew our wealth of experienced chef’s grew – we knew we had to utilise the knowledge of each of them to create an outstanding menu that all our settings could use. After all, nutrition is the key to unlocking our bodies potential!
Our aim was to devise menus that are nutritious, diverse, wholesome and delicious. Another very important aspect was to ensure we, as early years providers, were meeting the Early Years Foundation stage welfare requirement for the provision of health, balanced and nutritious food and drink.
Kindred's menus are accredited by Action for Children, Eat Better, Start Better nutritionists. What does this mean?
Action For Children’s Eat Better, Start Better guidance was developed to help Early Years providers meet the welfare requirements for food and drink. The guidance was updated in 2017 to reflect the governments dietary recommendations for children aged 6 months to 5 years. Their expert children nutritionists ensure all menus accredited meet the Public Health England best practice guidelines.
We are very happy that both our Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter menus have been approved and we now proudly display the Action for Children logo!
What was the process needed to have all the recipes accredited?
Back in September 2019, when we had our aspirations and aims of what we wanted our menus to look like, we quickly started up a working group with our nursery chef’s. We all got together in one room and had a super productive day putting all our ideas, knowledge, and experience onto paper. Together we created our menus and recipes!
The next step towards accreditation was to submit our menus to Action for children to be reviewed….fast forward a few months and a few tweaks later, and we were given the approved logo from Action for Children. Which shows that our menus have met the Public Health England best practice guidelines and the welfare requirements for food and drink. As you can imagine this has been such a great achievement for all of Kindred and most importantly to know that we are providing a balanced diet based on the four food groups to give children the nutrients they need to help them grow and develop.
What made you get involved in Kindred's menus and become so passionate about nutrition at Kindred?
I hate to sound like Jamie Oliver, but I really do feel strongly about the early intervention of a balanced diet. Giving children the opportunity to eat well for life means starting that early.
Go on, tell us your favourite Kindred recipe?
It would have to be Chickpea and Vegetable Biryani
