St Luke’s Grammar School, situated on Sydney's Northern Beaches, is an Anglican co-educational school for students from Preschool through to Year 12.  The canteen serves around 300 meals every day and prides itself on having a focus on fresh foods.  Canteen Manager Karen Uren says “4 years ago the decision was made to change the foods offered in the school canteen and we took all pre-made lunch items off the menu.  As in a restaurant, we cook our meals from scratch each day from fresh ingredients”.  This strategy appears to have worked, with St Lukes reporting a quadrupling of orders since the introduction of this new approach.

Of course, the fresh-food strategy has its challenges.  Karen’s team must work quickly and efficiently to prep the ingredients, cook the meals and fulfill the student pre-orders before lunchtime.  “Alongside the sheer workload of producing these meals we found that collating the paper bag orders and counting the money was taking up more and more time”, says Karen.  When dealing with paper orders, it was taking Karen’s team until 11AM to tally the orders, collect the money and place the change back in the bags.

In January 2009, St Luke’s brought in FlexiSchools to streamline their working day.  The online ordering system was introduced, which automatically collects the order details and payment, as well as producing a “production list” for the canteen staff.  The FlexiSchools online orders are automatically processed at 9:10AM, saving the canteen staff nearly two hours each day.

When FlexiSchools was first introduced a small group of parents signed up.  But within 8 weeks the online orders had risen from 25 to over 110. In addition to streamlining the processing, Karen has seen a 25-30% increase in the number of orders, with parents and students now ordering more items and more often than before. “Parents have welcomed the chance to set up standing orders knowing that this part of their child's day is under control and that the morning scrabble for money and lunch bags is a thing of the past”.

So what is the future for St Luke’s canteen? “Our goal is to have all pre-ordered lunches online only”, says Karen, “and in Term 3 we will be trailing one day that will be online only so it will be interesting to see the flood of parents and students registering for the service”.

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