By Bryan Yip

The RCHK canteen has resumed selling meals to students. Beginning on Monday, October 18 the school began to serve lunch in boxes by Chartwells to secondary students. 

RCHK stopped serving lunch to students with COVID 19’s spread, as the Education Bureau did not want students to eat in large groups at school to ensure the safety of the students. However, now the pandemic situation has improved, students are able to buy lunch at school again.

Each meal is priced at $29.50 and can only be purchased using Octopus, maximising allocated time.

The menu with three options is sent out to parents so that students can make their choices beforehand. Each option is served in a different location: the cafeteria, the pizza bar and the pasta bar. Of the three options, one is a meat option, the second fish, or another meat, and the last, a vegetarian option. 

RCHK business manager Samuel Hureau related the process of planning and getting approval from the EDB to serve food at school, as well as the problems and the uncertainties about the way the service is going to run. 

The school had to submit a plan to the EDB in order to be granted the right to be able to let students purchase food at school. The reason RCHK had half days before school resumed was because the EDB wanted to avoid students eating at school at all costs, even if that meant shortening the school day. However, since the Covid situation in Hong Kong has improved, EDB can allow schools to serve food to students, so long as the schools submit a plan to ensure the safety of the students. For example, RCHK lunch boxes will be served with a lid, to avoid contamination. Another example is the plan to show the partitions and the number of people in each area to ensure social distancing rules still apply while eating. 

One of the main initial challenges was that the school didn't know how many students would buy these lunch boxes, so estimating the size of the market was a difficulty, with two evils of food waste or lack of quantity. So Chartwells had to go into this blindly, with only an approximation. But after a couple of days, it is expected they will have a better idea of how much food to prepare. 

Another issue when planning the return of lunch has been how to ensure students eat in the right place. When school returned to full days, students were assigned locations to eat; these include the cafeteria, the first-floor cafeteria, the PAC, and the area between the pizza bar and the pasta bar. If students do not eat at their designated locations, this causes problems as it violates Covid capacity restriction, so this had to be carefully organised. 

Lunch boxes will not be offered to primary students because the school does not know how this new system will run. On paper, the students are supposed to just go up to the counter and buy their lunches, then go straight to their allocated areas to eat. However, since there are many different year groups that need to eat, the students will have to follow a tight schedule to accommodate all. However, this inflexible schedule does not allow for natural hindrances such as paying time, lunch choice deliberation and long lines. And since primary students will possibly take even longer to make a choice on which meal, take more time paying, and take longer to get to their allocated areas to eat, the lunch times are too short for this to be scheduled. Hence the meals will not be offered to primary students yet. However, Hureau added that the school would see how this new system performs with secondary students and, if it works, they will consider implementing this system to primary students as well.

For now, students are quite excited to be able to buy food at school again. One Year 7 student said, “I was quite excited about being able to eat school lunch again because the home lunch I brought to school tasted really bad”. Another student in Year 11 said, “It’s good to be able to buy lunch at school again, since bringing home lunch wasn’t very convenient.” Echoing this unanimous statement, RCHK has given the return of Chartwells school lunch a warm welcome.