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The purpose of this study is to investigate children’s school lunchboxes and explore the influence of carer’s perceived benefits and barriers towards healthy eating on the food contents packed for lunch.

Drawing on exchange theory, the study explores the relationship between carer’s perceived benefits and barriers towards healthy eating and the lunchbox contents a carer packs for their child. An online survey was completed by 876 parents and carers. Statistical analysis techniques, including one-way ANOVA and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) were used to analyse the data.

The analysis revealed that perceived benefits and barriers towards packing healthy foods had a significant impact on the reported contents packed for lunch. Results indicate the segment with the highest perceived benefits and the lowest perceived barriers towards packing healthy lunches reported packing healthier foods than the remaining three segments.

Social marketers should develop interventions to promote the benefits of healthy eating, while overcoming the perceived (and real) barriers that prevent healthy lunches from being packed. Study limitations and future research directions are outlined.

Drawing on exchange theory, the current study demonstrated how simultaneous measurement of benefits and barriers that are later divided into high and low groups impacts lunchbox packing behaviours (Nelson et al., 2010). This study contributes to the literature providing further empirical evidence that use of commercial marketing theories in social marketing is warranted and that theoretically derived segmentation approaches are available for social marketing practitioners.

Reports the conduct of a survey of children′s packed lunches where nutritional adequacy and consumer acceptability of the meals was evaluated; and temperature history of the food during transport and storage was monitored with temperature data loggers. The meals were found to be held at unacceptable temperatures for prolonged periods. Meals held in chilled insulated satchels did not suffer temperature abuse. One‐third of the meals were assessed as nutritionally inadequate. Significant numbers of the meals were high in fat and sugar and deficient in protein, calcium, and vitamin C. The meals did, however, receive consistently high ratings for consumer acceptability. Provides recommendations for improving the nutritional quality and the microbiological safety together with a code of practice suitable for distribution to parents.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct economic evaluation of a school meal programme based on principles of a New Nordic Diet (NND) by assessing the costs of the NND lunch, compared with packed lunch from home, and investigating potential effects of adjusting the NND principles underlying the school meals on the costs and on the rate of food waste.

The analysis combines recipes, dietary records and food waste data from a school meal intervention with collected price data within an economic optimization framework.

A New Nordic School meal programme consisting of a morning snack and a hot lunch based on fixed seasonal menu plans and with 75 per cent organic content is 37 per cent more expensive in terms of ingredient costs than corresponding packed school meals. This cost differential can be almost halved by introducing more flexible scheduling of week plans and reducing the level of organic ambition to 60 per cent. Reducing portion sizes could reduce the cost differential by an extra 5 per cent, which would also reduce food waste by about 15 per cent.

Higher costs and food waste in a restrictive ingredient sourcing school meal programme can be reduced by increased flexibility in meal scheduling, reduction in organic content and reduced average portion size.

Packed lunches now provide the midday meal for large numbers of children. There is, however, little information available on the contents of those packed lunches or on the nutritional thought behind them. Jennifer Clark, a community dietitian with Brighton Health Authority and Jennifer Platt, Reader in Sociology at the University of Sussex decided, therefore, to conduct a survey among schoolchildren in Sussex, to find out what they were eating and, if possible, why. Here is an outline of their investigation.

With the rising cost of school meals there has been a corresponding increase in the number of children taking packed lunches. Many people who hold the view that a ‘proper’ meal must be hot meat and two vegetables regard this as a retrograde step. Others welcome the change as a release from overcooked cabbage, mashed potatoes and interminable custard.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between lunchboxes, fun food and leisure. Looking beyond concerns focusing solely on health and nutrition, this article unpacks how mothers seek to provide lunchtime food that is also a source of leisure and pleasure.

Photo-elicitation interviews and a focus group were conducted with 11 mothers who regularly prepare lunchboxes for their children aged between 9 and 11 years.

Mothers intend the food they provide to act as a leisure experience and a break from the pressures of school. Mothers understand that lunchboxes must fit with children’s other activities taking place in their lunch-hour. Lunchboxes should support children’s future leisure opportunities by providing nutrition and variety to support their growth and development. The discussion of lunchboxes also shows that fun food is not simply understood in opposition to healthy food. Mothers have a wider understanding of the transgressive nature of fun through food, which goes beyond the market offer and understanding of fun.

As the study is based on a small sample of relatively affluent families in the UK, caution is needed in generalising the findings to wider groups. However, the study offers qualitative insights and highlights the connections between leisure, fun food and lunchboxes that can be explored in further research.

This is the first paper to explore the interconnections between lunchboxes, fun food and leisure. It provides valuable insight into mothers’ views about food prepared at home for consumption at school.

Presents new data comparing the nutrient content of school meals to proposed standards and showing the contribution of school meals to the overall diet of seven to eight‐year‐old children. School meals contributed 24 per cent of daily energy intake and 17 to 35 per cent of daily nutrient intake but compared unfavourably to the proposed standards, being too low in certain micronutrients and too high in percentage energy from fat. However, since the overall diets of the children were deemed satisfactory, it was concluded that standards were not necessary for energy and the majority of nutrients. A targeted approach, recommending suitable levels for nutrients of particular concern, was suggested as a more viable option.

Poor eating habits established during adolescence are likely to lead to negative long-term health consequences. The childhood obesity epidemic is a growing public health concern, largely attributed to obesogenic environments. This study aims to explore the multiple factors contributing positively or negatively to young consumers’ attitudes towards their food consumption.

In total, 42 11- to 13-years-old (24 men and 18 women) from three secondary schools in Wales participated in five focus group discussions. The process of thematic analysis resulted in several identified themes that influenced young consumers’ eating habits.

Extrapersonal factors compromised: education, peer pressure, parenting, availability and social media; and intrapersonal factors included: health consciousness, taste preferences, convenience and price consciousness. Contrary to previous research, the adolescent participants perceived their parents as more influential than their peer group, even during decision-making in the school canteen.

These research findings are beneficial for policy-makers working to develop an age-appropriate multi-factorial approach to promote healthful dietary practices amongst young consumers. For instance, increasing easily accessible food-to-go choices that are not only convenient to purchase and consume but also healthful could improve dietary intake.

A novel connection between peer pressure and convenience was discovered. Multiple factors contribute to young consumers’ attitudes towards food and their dietary habits.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a snapshot of secondary school food policy (SSFP) across the devolved nations (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) to offer insights into a growing area of policy concern. The selected context of research is school food policy (SFP), an area of research which has received little attention in terms of policy approaches. The review is focused on 2010 to 2022.

This work combines interdisciplinary perspectives spanning across food policy, public health, psychology, education and sociology. This combination has merit as it offers different perspectives in terms of understanding SFP. The study was conducted between August 2021 and March 2022, using a desk-based review, analysing policies on food in secondary schools. Data collection was conducted through the Web using key search terms. The READ (Read, Extract, Analyse, Distil) approach was used as a systematic procedure to analyse policy and evaluation documents.

To all levels of government, it is recommended that a coherent policymaking approach be used to tackle SSFP improvements, to progress a whole school approach to food, supported by long-term dedicated resources while engaging children in SSFP development. For education departments, it is recommended that a food curriculum review, connected to school meals alongside a refocus on school food standards monitoring and reporting is crucial in serving the future generations. The current economic crisis has had an impact on public spending. Universal Free School Meals has been said to make an enormous difference to well-being.

The current findings suggest that researching SFP across nations has merit. There is a relative lack of focus on secondary schools, in light of England’s focus on the National Food Strategy (focus on children), post-pandemic, economic crisis – together this makes school food and food policy a topic of real urgency and importance. Lessons can both be learned, particularly in promoting healthier and more educationally inclusive school food practices. Research in this area can inform curriculum design and school food environment and system changes from the perspective of learnings around taking a whole school food approach to education.

Health ambassadors are co-workers assigned to facilitate healthy choices amongst the ambassadors'' colleagues and are increasingly used in workplace health promotion. In a municipality in the southern region of Denmark, occupational health and safety (OHS) representatives were appointed as health ambassadors to facilitate the development of healthy lifestyle initiatives at the ambassadors' workplace and the uptake of various health offers from the municipality's workplace health programme amongst the ambassadors' colleagues. The aim of this study was to understand how employees and managers from the municipality experienced the health ambassador-facilitated implementation of the health programme.

The study was designed as an interview study with (n = 13) semi-structured interviews. Using purposeful sampling, the authors invited participants who held different positions (e.g. managers and regular employees) on two different work teams in the municipality. The work teams (a construction team and a healthcare team) differed in gender profile and work tasks but were both categorised as physically heavy work. Malterud's systematic text condensation was used to devise the strategy for the analysis.

The authors' findings show that the employees considered health a private matter that the workplace should not interfere with, and this challenged the implementation of the health programme. Secondly, the health ambassadors were not properly trained to facilitate health initiatives amongst the ambassadors' colleagues; instead, the managers were the driving force in the implementation of health initiatives.

The study provides useful insights into the processes of implementing health in the workplace and emphasises the importance of involving employees in design and planning of initiatives for workplace health promotion.