North Cork: Keeping school meals local and fresh

Duhallow Community Food Services provides a made-from-scratch meals service to local schools, feeding 2,987 children every day

Linda O’Connor, manager of food operations at Duhallow Community Food Services, oversees the busy kitchen as thousands of school meals are prepared and packed at the organisation’s base in Duhallow. The service caters for 30 schools daily. Picture: Chani Anderson

“WHEN it’s government-funded, we’re all paying for it. These are our children, they’re the next generation, and they need to be fed right,” says Duhallow Community Food Services manager Linda O’Connor.

In 2025, the Government extended the hot school meals scheme, which had started as a pilot scheme in 2019 with just 36 schools, to all primary schools in the country. 

It is an important element of O’Connor’s job at the DCFS centre in Newmarket, which feeds children from North West Cork and East Kerry, stretching from the Sliabh Luachra region of Kerry to Mallow, from Mountcollins in the north to Inchigeelagh in the south and all in between.

Linda O’Connor, manager of food operations, and Maura Walsh, founder of Duhallow Community Food Services, inside the restaurant at the community-based enterprise. Pictures: Chani Anderson

She reels off the numbers as we walk swiftly — with 72 staff working at the centre, O’Connor is always busy — through the bustling space on a Monday morning.

“We supply 30 primary schools with 2,987 meals daily,” she says. “Each meal, which is made from scratch in our kitchen, includes 120g of carbohydrates, 180g of vegetables, and 80g of protein. Those are the Government guidelines, and we have to hit the mark every time.”

Parents and pupils receive a menu each week with 10 daily options. Every day, their chosen meal is made from scratch in the fast-paced kitchen, packed and labelled with the child’s name, placed into black insulated boxes — one per classroom — and delivered swiftly so it is still hot when it arrives at schools.

Under the hot school meals programme, the meals are free to primary school children. The Government pays €3.20 per meal and Duhallow Community Food Services works to ensure as much of that money as possible stays in the area, using suppliers including McCarthy’s Butchers of Kanturk, Fenit Fruit & Veg and Murphy’s Bakery. 

“It’s great for the community,” says O’Connor, “keeping money local and providing local employment.”

More than 2,500 school meals are packed in the kitchens at Duhallow Community Food Services each day. 

There’s also a focus on nutrition, points out O’Connor, a trained chef. “The chefs start at 4am and all sauces are made from scratch. The curry sauce contains vegetables such as carrots, cauliflower, and broccoli. We absolutely pack it with hidden veg. The ragu sauce is also made up of so many vegetables,” she says. We need to be able to support [the children] with a balanced diet.”

Linda O’Connor, manager of food operations at Duhallow Community Food Services, pictured outside the restaurant, which forms part of the wider catering and bakery operation. 

Some of the rural schools they supply have as few as 18 students — numbers that many providers find unviable — but DCFS is nimble enough, and local enough, to make it work.

Hot meals have a direct impact

The hot meals have a direct impact that the teachers can see in the classroom: “One teacher told me that the children are more inclined to come to school,” says O’Connor. “Especially on the curry days. There’s great excitement when the lunches arrive.”

The logistics of the primary school hot school lunches are just one element of O’Connor’s job: she’s also responsible for a meals-on-wheels service that feeds 120 people every day; supplying two secondary schools in Kanturk with up to 1,000 meals; feeding 120-160 youngsters at a local creché, and another 30-40 children in a Newmarket after-school programme. 

There’s also an on-site community café, a bakery and a catering service in the one-storey building, which is based alongside the James O’Keefe Centre in Newmarket. O’Connor estimates that they feed between 4,000 and 4,500 people every day.

As we sit in the bright café, flooded with rare springtime sun, that’s easy to believe. The production kitchens are going full tilt with school food and meals-on-wheels departing in DCFS-branded vans, the bakery ovens are turning out a stream of apple tarts, scones, and brownies, a carvery-style lunch service is about to start, and there’s a stream of hungry customers arriving, greeting each other and joining friends at tables as they wait to be served.

Staff work in the bakery at Duhallow Community Food Services, where Ukrainian bakers displaced by war are part of the team specialising in cakes and sweet treats for the restaurant and catering orders. 

This thriving food business has its roots in a programme set up in the 1990s with European Social Funding, says Maura Walsh when she joins us. Walsh is the dynamic founder and director of DCFS and the CEO of IRD (Integrated Regional Development) Duhallow, a not-for-profit enterprise that works to establish and support initiatives focused on generating enterprise to benefit communities in this region of North West Cork.

“It was born out of a community ethos,” says Walsh, “starting with a meals-on-wheels service for just eight people in 1996.”

A selection of cupcakes and iced delicacies prepared in the bakery.

From small beginnings, delivering hot nutritious meals to those few elderly individuals from an incubator hub kitchen in Boherbue, they moved to this purpose-built space in Newmarket in 2014, and now their rural meals service is just one aspect of how they support and nourish the people of this region.

“Right from the very start, we focused on quality,” says Walsh. “Decent plain food. The further you divorce people from their food source, the worse off we all are. Your core food should be from your region.”

The quality of the school meals service — supporting local food systems and cooking from scratch — has drawn recent attention to DCFS. Earlier this month, Walsh and O’Connor accepted the 2026 Community Food Award from the Irish Food Writers’ Guild, which said in its citation: “Every town and village in Ireland needs a Duhallow Community Food Service to feed our children, support our farmers and provide meaningful employment.”

Does DCFS offer a template that other community kitchens could put into action?

“This could be totally replicated,” says Walsh. “Local development companies are covering every part of this island, are rooted in their communities, and they have the governance, capacity, and experience of implementing large-scale projects. I think this is why it could be scalable so fast. We’re looking at social enterprise, the circular economy and social economy — it’s not all about maximising profit.”

See: duhallowfoodservices.ie