LunchLAB Eats: October 2025
A recap of our first month of service for the 2025/2026 school year!
Dear LunchLAB Community,
Happy Fall!
The return of LunchLAB for the 2025/2026 school year has been bustling with energy and excitement! This month, our schools welcomed back students and introduced many new faces to the kitchen, both in the lunchroom and among our incredible volunteers. We launched new volunteer and registration platforms to make joining LunchLAB easier than ever, and saw our highest-ever registration numbers:
220 eaters at Lord Roberts
155 eaters at Norquay
36 eaters at Total Education
Feeding the entire school communities at χpey̓ and Seymour
Our team has also been busy supporting school community events, from Norquay’s Reading Morning to back-to-school BBQs, open kitchens, and even a Grade 8 welcome lunch.
We also had a special visit from the French-language Ici Radio-Canada Première crew at Lord Roberts, who spent the day filming our students, chefs, and volunteers in action for an upcoming story. Check out the video:
A special thank you to the Lord Roberts PAC for generously purchasing a food dehydrator for the school! It will enhance students’ learning around food preservation and give our student eaters a fun new way to add texture and flavour to their salad bar creations.
Finally, in this newsletter, we share an exciting fundraising update from our fall gala, From Farms to Forks!
It’s been a full and lively fall start, and we can’t wait to see what’s cooking next.
– Growing Chefs Team
LunchLAB Menu
Lunches change daily, and menus are inspired by the communities we serve. Each meal includes a fresh salad bar and a hot item (meat or vegetarian) made by our Chefs-In-Residence, student chefs, sous chefs, and volunteers!
Some highlights include working as a team to assemble hundreds of burritos, ramen with soy-marinated eggs and crunchy toppings, and a spooky Halloween feast at Total Education!
Take a look at what we cooked up in October:
Supplier Spotlight: Fresh Roots
Each week, we partner with Fresh Roots to bring freshly harvested, hyper-local produce straight from their schoolyard farm at Vancouver Technical Secondary School to our LunchLAB kitchens.
We cook with what’s seasonally available, and the Chefs-In-Residence find creative ways to introduce it into the menus. The produce is often harvested the very same morning and is delivered directly to our schools for use in the salad bar, pickling projects, dehydrating, or as part of our hot meals.
A peek into what Fresh Roots is supplying this season:
Leafy vegetables: Salad mixes, Kale, Chard, Collards
Root vegetables: Radishes, Carrots, Turnips
Onions, GarlicSquashes
Broccolini
This month, the Fresh Roots farmers also visited Norquay Elementary, sharing fun facts about their farm and the seasonal produce they grow, and answering all of our student chefs’ curious questions.
This partnership not only supports local urban farming but also connects students to the source of their food, from the field to the fork.
Welcome to the LunchLAB Café!
You may recall us sharing photos of our team prototyping the LunchLAB café series in September. We’re happy to share that the LunchLAB café sessions have launched, and our first teams of student chefs have been cooking up a storm! Over the course of five sessions, student chefs take part in the full lunch cycle in a similar fashion to café operations—donning the hats of managers, hosts, servers, bussers, and the clean team. The student chefs go through hands-on and seasonal activities, learning firsthand that every role at their café is crucial to serving delicious dishes to their school!
Check out the student journey infographic, where you’ll see how students moved from food prep foundations to kitchen managers serving signature dishes in their cafés:
Our delicious menus this term have been thoughtfully designed to align with each session’s learning themes, brought to life through hands-on teaching moments. For example, sushi bakes and burritos focus on harnessing the power of assembling and presentation, and the salad bar highlights seasonality.
Speaking of delicious… if you’d like to find out more about how we plan our menus to go above and beyond the Canada Food Guide and how we curate our dishes to be both educational and tasty, check out our updated menu planning principles post:
October Volunteer Recap: Our First Month with Vome!
Since launching our new volunteer platform, Vome, this fall, our volunteer community has been cooking up some serious impact!
We now have 46 volunteers active in Vome, including 17 parent volunteers, with 10 brand new parents joining and 7 returning to lend their support. Altogether, that’s 27 brand new volunteers and 19 returning volunteers helping make LunchLAB magic happen.
From our first week of service to the end of October, volunteers have filled 68 shifts—that’s over 200 hours of time, care, and energy poured into supporting students and school communities!
A huge thank you to everyone who has joined us on the new platform and embraced the transition to Vome. You’ve helped make the rollout smooth and successful—and we’re just getting started!
Join our growing community and help us bring good food and food education to even more classrooms this year. Check out the link below and apply now!
Celebrating 20 Years of Growing Chefs and the Most Successful Gala in Growing Chefs’ History!
The LunchLAB team kick-started October by participating in Growing Chefs’ largest fundraising event of the year, the From Farms to Forks gala!
What made this evening particularly special was that we were celebrating our 20th anniversary. In 2005, our founder, Chef Merri Schwartz, Chef Andrea Carlson (Burdock & Co., Harvest Community Foods, and Bar Gobo), and Chef Gabriella Meyer (Harvest Community Foods) visited Champlain Heights Elementary and piloted the very first session of our Classroom Gardening & Cooking Program.
Over the course of 20 years, we have grown countless gardens, shared many lunches, and worked alongside thousands of kids, chefs, and farmers. We continue to run our Classroom Program and—of course—operate LunchLAB! This gala was a celebration of our community and history.
At the gala, student chefs took centre stage and shared their favourite experiences from LunchLAB to a crowd of over 300 guests!
Later in the evening, our Chef-In-Residence, Tasha, was joined by the student chefs to cook up a toothsome Seasonal Vegetables with Bagna Càuda dish to serve guests.
Through the tremendous and generous support of our community, we raised a record $168,250 to help maintain our Classroom Program and grow LunchLAB in the school year ahead! Thank you to everyone who attended our gala, purchased a raffle ticket, bid on auction items, and supported us on social media. Every contribution made a significant impact on the success of this year’s gala.
Not only did we raise vital funds, but we also reconnected and built new relationships with the people behind so many beloved restaurants, farms, and businesses in B.C.
What a magical evening. We hope to see you at our next event!
Help Us Shape the Future of Growing Chefs
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Thank you from all of us at Growing Chefs!
Thank you for tuning in to our LunchLAB Community Newsletter. For any questions or comments, please reach out to lunchlab@growingchefs.ca!