School meals in Catalonia: surveillance and quality control

The Education Council of the Catalonian government drew up a programme to improve the quality control of school canteens in Catalonia. The objectives of this programme were to contribute to developing healthier eating habits in school children through school canteens and to improve school canteen services considering other aspects such as service, operation, management, end-users, frontline staff and supervisors of menu planning. This paper deals with two programme components aiming at introducing Nutrition in the school syllabus and school menu assessment. Various departments, organisations and associations were involved in programme development and implementation. Initial analysis was based on information collected from formal administrative reports completed by a survey on 100 primary schools. From this preliminary analysis it was concluded that problem identification needs to be completed by an understanding of underlying reasons in order to design adequate solutions and guarantee implementation.