At Canterbury Busy Bees we take healthy eating and good nutrition seriously . All our food is prepared on site by the nursery chef, Simon.

We pride ourselves on our links with local suppliers within the community and are pleased to be able to source much of our produce from these local businesses.

Simon the Fish, from The Good Shed Farmers Market in Canterbury provides us with our smoked haddock  and Whitstable greengrocers and Granny Smiths provide us with fruit and vegetables, as well as delicious free range eggs. Whitstable butchers Salvatoris provides our meat and Dairy Crest keep us stocked with milk and bread.

We are also pleased to be able to use herbs from our own garden.

Our menus are varied and colourful and contain lots of fruit and vegetables and we appreciate the benefits of eating fish and include two fish meals in our menus each week.

For those children here early, we start the day with a healthy breakfast of cereal and wholemeal toast. Mid-morning the children are offered a variety of fresh fruits as a snack. Lunch is a cooked, nutritious meal and tea ranges from sandwiches to jacket potatoes.

We cater for all children’s dietary requirements.

We like to encourage the children to take an active part in mealtimes and have introduced a ‘Make your own pudding Day’ into our weekly menus.The children are very proud of their creations!

As the children get older we like to increase their independence and they can make choices at snack time and serve themselves dinner from the table.

Family involvement is a huge factor in our menu design too. We ask families to inform us of any meals their children particularly enjoy, favourite foods and cultural dishes that we can add to our menus, ensuring we provide a broad range of tastes and flavours and reflect the diversity of our nursery.

The Chef

Simon is our chef and has 12 years of experience within the catering industry. He was previously head chef at Pinocchios restaurant in Canterbury and joined Busy Bees in February 2007. Italian food is Simon’s favourite thing to cook, but he loves to eat a good roast dinner!