children

Lazy Lunches is a supplier contracted to the Ministry of Education to supply Lunches in schools

Meet our team take 1!

My name is Ataahua Solomon, I was born and raised in Kaiapoi and over the last 2 years have the privilege to provide some of my local schools and families with lunches under the Ka Ora, Ka Ako program. I am a mother of 4 children, 2 girls and 2 boys!

I first started making lunches for my own children, I had purchased cute bento boxes and all the accessories to make lunches more enjoyable for my kids. Hiding all the nutrients behind cute food picks, containers and my trusty sandwhich and cookie/fruit cutters. My son, Kereama, has autism, desperately, I was trying to widen his taste pallet. I began posting these on my Facebook and instagram pages where families are friends would jokingly ask for a lunch providing service and instead of saying no, I said yes! And off we went into this fun new journey, and Lazy Lunches was born.

Even though I originally started making lunches privately to take the burden off of busy families I was approached by one of our schools who had just been invited into the program, with no current suppliers in my area they were in need of one to become approved under the MOE and again, I said Yes!

I put in a lot of hard work, from council applications, Menu planning, working with a nutritional advisor (on many occasions), sourcing suppliers, business planning, waste solutions and the list went on. Once I was approved and ready to supply my first school I needed to find some staff who could help me (you will get to meet our team). At the beginning, the 3 of us would start at 6am to get lunches out on time. After a while we managed to cut our time down by afew hours.

Shortly after we were approached by another school, and then another and now with LL we have created 4 permanent jobs and 2 casual positions while successfully proving 600 lunches a day.

This program and it’s success is important to me because of who it impacts. Me and my team try hard to listen to the voice of the students and take in every piece of feedback that is provided by each school and adjust our meals as needed as quickly as we can. We also make changes based on intake. If we notice a meal isn’t as popular and we have room to change then we do.

Our vision has always remained the same - To provide families with nutritional lunches that fall inside the requirements or the MOE.

If you would like to know more or need to get in touch, feel free to hit the message button at the top

Ataahua