Welcome to Tayside Contracts - Keeping Life Moving

School Catering

Tayside Contracts is the largest school catering provider in Tayside. As part of our Best Value strategy we continue to work closely with the Education departments, head teachers, pupils and parents in the continuous development of catering services to meet the needs of today's more discerning customers.

Not only does the Catering Service provider need to satisfy the essential factors such as nutrition, quality and value for money, but also provide variety and an acute understanding of what our customer base actually need and enjoy.

The main benefits of this approach is that all ideas are taken on board in the development of a number of initiatives which have been designed to keep both menus and service delivery fresh, lively and fine tuned to meet the individual needs of our diverse customer base. Good communication is an integral part of our service and we believe that it is important to involve our customers where possible in service development.

Below are out current projects or initiatives:

Café Discovery

Dundee is well known as the 'City of Discovery' and as a result we have developed a non branded 'Food Court' scheme named 'Café Discovery'. This encompasses a complete new livery in terms of signage, vibrant colour schemes and stylish seating, lighting and music in keeping with many of our high street competitors. This has been successfully rolled out to all secondary schools in the city as part of a continual improvement plan.

Swipe Cards

Technology plays a key role in Tayside Contracts secondary school operations throughout the region, with the implementation of the use of swipe cards.

Queuing was highlighted by pupils as a major problem area, however with swipe cards replacing cash handling at the point of service queuing has been reduced dramatically. The cards may be topped up at various terminals dotted around the school, are more secure than carrying cash, help in reducing instances of bullying and removal of the stigma associated with the issue of free meal tickets.

Pupils are given credit for making informed choices with our 'healthy points' scheme – points do make prizes!! in the form of mountain bikes, CDs --- this has proved to be a great incentive in many of our schools.

As part of our programme of continuous development secondary schools throughout Angus have the added value of the 'Young Scot' application attached to their cards. In Dundee, St Johns Secondary has been piloted in the development of the 'Smart Card' application which could be used for a variety of applications.

Projects Aims:

Proving the benefits of the smartcard scheme to the various stakeholders – pupils, parents, teachers and other staff, school management, education department and service providers such as the catering supplier
Applying standards of inter-operability with non-school applications such as bus travel, libraries and leisure
Developing management rules and procedures which could be passed on to other smartcard projects.

Taycat

Taycat is our cuddly friendly and extremely popular schools catering mascot that is used throughout nursery/primary schools to promote healthy eating and fun at lunchtimes. Pupils on occasions have the opportunity to collect 'paw points' by selecting the healthier options available daily. The 'paw points' can secure entry to a prize draw to win a range of prizes….Taycat says... "School Lunches are Purrfect and meouthwatering!"

If you have any questions regarding our services please feel free to Contact Us.

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