Erwan de Gavelle, Head of the Food Policy Office, Ministry of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty (testimonial from the dossier “INRAE for healthy and sustainable food in school catering” – 2025)

School catering is an area that touches on a number of issues: health, the environment, education, social equity and so on. How is it dealt with at MASA?

Within the Directorate-General for Food, the Food Policy Office supports the transition to healthy, sustainable food for all. The National Food Programme is our general framework for action. It is broken down into 3 thematic areas: social justice, the fight against waste and food education; and 2 cross-cutting areas: collective catering, particularly in schools, and regional food projects. These different areas are interconnected, as are the provisions of the EGalim law, which, in addition to addressing the issues of mass catering, focuses on fair remuneration for farmers. This orientation explains why MASA is piloting this policy, but it is not doing so alone. Our office is working with a number of other ministries, for example the Ministry of Health on the National Health Nutrition Programme, the Ministry of the Environment on the fight against food waste, the Ministry of Solidarity on the “€1 canteen” scheme, and the Ministry of Education on initiatives to raise awareness of the importance of “eating better” among children and on revising references for introductory cookery training diplomas.

How does MASA support public players in the school catering sector?

Since 2019, MASA has developed the “ma cantine” platform. It informs collective catering managers about the obligations of the EGalim law, supplemented by the Climate and Resilience law, and equips them to meet these obligations. Within the Conseil national pour la restauration collective (National Council for Contract Catering), we identify the needs of players in the sector, for example for vegetarian recipes and menus or information on public contracts for contract catering, and work together with the expertise of all stakeholders to develop tools to support them. Practical guides for public catering contracts have been drawn up to help the purchasers concerned achieve their legal objectives. Lastly, the platform will be used to collect supply data to monitor efforts to achieve objectives, and to submit an annual report to Parliament. In 2024, 21% of the mass catering sector declared their 2023 supplies online, twice as many as the previous year. Procurement rates exceed 25% for sustainable and quality products, including 12% for organic products. So efforts are well underway and must continue.

How is research informing MASA in the field of school catering?

Research was central to assess the positive impact of the first decree on the nutritional quality of meals served in school catering published in 2011. Recent research has also guided the updating of this decree, which is currently being finalised. On the issue of food waste, another key point of the EGalim law, we lack a structured network in France, but we are working to create more links with research on this subject. Some of the data from ‘ma cantine’ is available in open access for research, and we are working to broaden the scope of accessible data so that it can be used by scientists to gain a better understanding of the obstacles and levers to the supply of quality products. We are also interested in the work of the international research consortium on health and nutrition in schools, which puts into perspective and promotes the French model internationally and provides information on good practice in other countries. Similarly, we are interested in the progress of the Priority Research Programme and Equipment’s (PEPR) work on Food Systems, Microbiome and Health (SAMS), which aims to identify the determinants of changes in dietary behaviour and the conditions under which they could both contribute to the prevention of health risks and encourage a shift towards more sustainable food systems.