How Do Food Service Managers Look at School Catering? A Qualitative Content Analysis of a Roundtable Discussion on School Meals Provision

Abstract

Children are a vulnerable group in terms of obesity: nearly 20% of Hungarian kindergarten and school-aged children are overweight or obese. School catering plays a decisive role in shaping children's nutritional behavior. To support the prevention of obesity and to increase the quality of children's diets, legislation passed in 2014 included provisions on school catering. This paper provides a qualitative content analysis of a roundtable discussion on the school catering system that took place at an interdisciplinary conference, with the aim of identifying the most important messages about school meals conveyed by the discussion. During the qualitative analysis of the roundtable discussion, seven main categories emerged: factors supporting the acceptance/implementation of public catering; factors hindering the acceptance/implementation of public catering; everyday problems in the implementation of public catering; the task of caterers and public catering; the transformation of public catering; cooperation among parties with an interest in public catering; and factors helping children to cooperate. The co-occurrence network of subcategories and values can be broken down into one large component and several separate, small components. Thus, it can be concluded that the majority of subthemes and values are grouped into a coherent system. The results point to the key role of school catering in healthy nutrition and nutrition education, and the importance of close cooperation among parties with an interest in school catering to promote the social acceptance of catering and the prevention of childhood obesity.