Local company Lunch Bag is set to triple in size after the recent announcement of the expansion of the Government’s Hot School Meals scheme.
The Nenagh business is already Ireland’s largest provider of primary school lunches but has now announced a €7.5 million expansion.
As well as the Nenagh jobs they will be taking on over 450 part-time staff around the country to operate the service daily in the schools.
Managing Director Ger Killian explains how the government announcement has affected them.
“We only provide a private paid service for parents – we set up in 2019 because we were realising that there are children in Ireland that have no way of accessing school meals if they were not in a Deis school. So we set up the Lunch Bag to remedy that. Now what has happened I suppose is that we would have 117,000 children on our register and of those schools 315 are about to transfer from paid private service cold service to a government funded hot service.”
The company will grow from 200 staff at the moment to almost 900 with 450 part-time workers operating the service in schools every day.
Ger Killian explains what kind of people they are looking to hire.
“240 staff we’re going to need in Nenagh or based from Nenagh and those jobs are going to range in everything from general operatives, drivers, warehouse staff, kitchen staff, kitchen prep and picking & packing hot food. And that’s just based in Nenagh.
“Then we will have over 450 part-time jobs nationwide.”
