Lunch is Ready! From an Idea to 2,500 Lunches a Week
Sometimes an opportunity begins with looking at what is already there and imagining what it could become. For The Food Sharing Project, that opportunity came into focus in 2024.
For decades, our work has centred on helping schools across Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington provide nutritious food for students. Much of that work involves delivering food to schools, where staff and volunteers at schools turn those ingredients into breakfast, snack and meal programs.
Then the landscape of school food in Canada began to change.
In 2024, the federal government announced the creation of Canada’s National School Food Program, committing $1 billion over 5 years to work with provinces, territories and Indigenous partners to expand access to school food programs.
For The Food Sharing Project, it opened the door to think differently about what school food could look like here at home.
At the same time, another opportunity was emerging.
Across our community, school cafeterias and kitchens that had once been busy spaces had not necessarily returned to the same level of use following the COVID-19 pandemic. The kitchens were there. The equipment was there. The need was there. What if we could bring those pieces together?
That question helped lead to the creation of The Food Sharing Project’s Lunch is Ready! program.
Rather than only providing ingredients for schools to prepare themselves, The Food Sharing Project began exploring how we could prepare complete lunches and deliver them directly to schools.
It started with a pilot
From March to June 2025, more than 12,000 lunches were prepared and served through the pilot, reaching students at 7 schools. Each meal included a prepared lunch, fruit and milk, giving students a complete meal ready to enjoy at school.
The pilot gave us the chance to learn what worked, what needed to change and what it would take to build a prepared-meal program at a much larger scale.
Most importantly, it showed us what was possible.
The Lunch is Ready! program now comes to life through 3 kitchen operations, each with its own story.
The kitchen at LiUNA Local 183 has been an important part of the growth of the Lunch is Ready! program. Through LiUNA’s generosity and partnership, our staff and volunteers have access to a commercial kitchen where hundreds of meals are prepared for students each week.
At Regiopolis-Notre Dame Catholic High School, we saw another kind of opportunity: bringing an existing school kitchen back into regular use. After sitting largely unused for years following the pandemic, the kitchen is once again doing what a school kitchen was built to do: feed students.
Our partnership with Jobwell Enterprises provides another important part of the program. Jobwell was there during the early pilot and continues to help us build the capacity needed to prepare more lunches for more schools.
Behind 2,500 lunches are a lot of hands
A lunch arriving at a school may look simple. Getting it there is anything but.
Every week, our staff plan menus, purchase ingredients, coordinate orders, prepare and cook meals, organize production and make sure thousands of lunches reach schools.
Then there are our volunteers. They arrive ready to work alongside our team. They wash and prepare produce. They portion ingredients. They assemble meals. They pack lunches. They help turn a kitchen full of ingredients into something ready for a student to eat.
There is something powerful about watching that happen.
One person might be cutting vegetables. Another is portioning a meal. Someone else is packing the finished lunches. Staff are moving between stations, checking quantities and preparing for the next school.
It takes many hands working together to prepare 2,500 lunches for students across our community every week.
For the student receiving it, all of that work comes down to something simple: there is a nutritious lunch ready for them to eat.
That is what the Lunch is Ready! program was created to do. As we continue to build the program, there is an opportunity to bring that lunch to even more students across KFL&A.
