Lime Tree pupils get creative in the kitchen

​Pupils at Lime Tree Primary School in Merstham could be forgiven for having increasingly high expectations of their school dinners following Year Three’s recent trip to the Winterbotham Darby food company.

​As part of their ‘Scrumdiddlyumptious!' learning topic this term, 90 pupils from Lime Tree became the first school pupils allowed to take a look behind the scenes at the company, which specialises in providing own-brand chilled foods to supermarkets across Europe, including Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Morrisons.

The particular focus of their trip was the company’s production of olives and olive-based products.

“As the company hadn’t done anything like this before, a group of teachers visited them beforehand to work out how we could structure the visit, and it turned out to be a huge success,” said Claire Wilkinson, Key Stage Two leader, who was involved in organising the trip.

“The children had a talk about how the olives get from tree to supermarket shelf, and were then given the challenge of coming up with a range of child-friendly olives! They had five types of olives and four types of cheese along with lemon zest and a range of herbs and oil, and were encouraged to mix them together to come up with new flavours.”

The trip turned out to be a productive one for the pupils from Lime Tree, which opened in 2013 as part of the Surrey-based GLF Schools multi-academy trust, and last year moved to new purpose-built facilities at the Battlebridge Lane site.

“At the end of the day, everyone took their newly created olive flavours home for their friends and family to enjoy,” added Miss Wilkinson. “This week, they’ve been given a box of tomatoes and set the challenge of coming up with something new from them. We can’t wait to see how they do!”