My niece’s school canteen menu landed in my inbox last week. Monday: meat pie and a juice box. Tuesday: hot dog with chips. Wednesday: chicken nuggets with garlic bread. This is a public school in suburban Melbourne in 2026.

I know school canteen operators work with tight budgets and tighter margins. I know kids are picky. I know it’s complicated. But we can do better than this, and some schools are starting to prove it.

The current state of play

Australian school canteen nutrition is governed by state-based guidelines, not national standards. The quality varies enormously. Victoria’s School Canteen and Other School Food Services Policy has detailed traffic light categories for food items, but enforcement is essentially voluntary. Schools are encouraged to follow the guidelines but face no real consequences for ignoring them.

A 2024 audit by Deakin University’s Global Obesity Centre found that approximately 40 percent of items sold in surveyed Victorian school canteens fell into the “red” category — foods that should be sold rarely, if at all. The situation was similar in other states.

The reasons are structural. School canteens typically operate on razor-thin margins. They’re often run by parent volunteers or small operators with limited training. Healthy food generally costs more to prepare and has shorter shelf life than processed alternatives. A frozen meat pie is cheap, easy to heat, and doesn’t go off. A fresh salad roll requires daily preparation and generates waste if it doesn’t sell.

What’s working

Some schools have cracked the code. And the common thread isn’t just commitment — it’s smart operations.

Caulfield Grammar in Melbourne partnered with a nutritionist to redesign their canteen menu around whole foods, cooking from scratch on-site. The initial cost was higher, but by reducing waste and building student buy-in (kids actually participated in menu development), they brought the costs back to manageable levels within a year.

Several schools in South Australia have adopted the Right Bite program, which provides detailed menus, recipes, and supply chain connections for school canteens. Schools using the program report both improved nutritional quality and reduced food waste.

The technology angle is interesting too. Some school canteen operators are now using AI-driven ordering systems that predict demand based on historical sales data, weather, and school calendar events. When you know that 80 percent of orders on hot days are cold items, you stop overproducing hot food that gets wasted.

AI consultants in Brisbane have been working with school food service providers on these demand forecasting systems. Early results suggest waste reductions of 20-30 percent, which directly improves the financial viability of serving healthier options.

The funding elephant

No amount of innovation fixes the fundamental funding problem. Australian schools receive far less public funding for food services than comparable countries. In Finland, every student receives a free, nutritious school lunch. In Japan, school lunches are part of the curriculum and prepared by qualified staff.

In Australia, school food is treated as a user-pays commercial operation that happens to be located in a school. The incentives are aligned towards profit and convenience, not nutrition.

The Gonski 2.0 recommendations touched on this. Several health advocacy groups have called for universal free school meals, or at minimum, a national nutritional standard with adequate funding. Progress has been glacial.

What parents can do

I’m cautious about putting this entirely on parents. The system should be better. But in the meantime:

Engage with the canteen committee. Most schools have one. If yours doesn’t, help start one. Volunteer if you can. The parents who show up are the ones who influence what gets served.

Support healthy options when they appear. If the canteen introduces a sushi day or a salad bar, make sure your kids know it exists. Menu items that don’t sell get removed.

Don’t demonise canteen food at home. This backfires. Kids who feel guilty about eating a meat pie are more likely to eat it secretly than kids who understand it’s an occasional choice.

Pack lunches when you can. I know this is a privilege statement. Not everyone has the time or resources. But if you do, a packed lunch with real food is still the most reliable option.

The bigger picture

How we feed children at school reflects our values. Right now, Australia’s approach says we value low cost and convenience over nutrition. That might be economically rational in the short term, but the long-term health costs of a generation raised on processed canteen food will dwarf whatever we’d spend on better school food services today.

This should be a national conversation. The fact that it isn’t tells you something about our priorities.