The Healthy Wave toolkit: A City Guide to Better School Meals
Updated: Aug 27
The Healthy Wave Toolkit is a hands‑on resource designed to help cities and their partners create healthier, more sustainable school meal systems. It brings together evidence, tools, and real‑world lessons to support actors who want to shift from fragmented initiatives to a coordinated, system‑wide approach. At its core, the toolkit helps stakeholders understand how school food environments function, where leverage points for change exist, and which interventions can generate lasting impact.
1. What the toolkit Is
The toolkit is a practical roadmap for improving school meals through a systems lens. It combines:
- A shared framework for analyzing school food environments
- Tools for diagnosing challenges and opportunities
- Step‑by‑step guidance for designing interventions
- Templates for stakeholder engagement, planning, and monitoring
- Case examples from cities that have already implemented healthier meal programs
The toolkit is grounded in the principles of the Whole School Food Approach (WSFA), ensuring that interventions address not only meals themselves but also culture, education, environment and community engagement.
It is not a policy document, it is a working instrument that cities, schools, NGOs, and food system partners can directly apply.
2. How we developed it
The toolkit was created through a co‑creation process involving cities, schools, researchers, and civil‑society organizations. Development followed three main phases:
Evidence gathering: reviewing international research, collecting useful tools & methodologies and alignment with the extensively tested and European-standard WSFA.
Field learning: documenting insights from the Healthy Wave pilot cities, workshops during the project and feedback from the target audience of municipalities.
Iterative design: testing draft tools in real settings during the Healthy Wave project, refining them with the partners involved and ensuring they work for both small and large municipalities and for both starting and advanced (school meal) cities.
This collaborative approach ensures the toolkit is grounded in practice, not theory.
3. Who should use it
Although cities are the primary audience, the toolkit is relevant for any stakeholder shaping school meals, including:
Local governments and city administrations
School directors and pedagogical teams
Caterers and food service providers
Public health agencies
NGOs working on nutrition, sustainability, or food justice
Parent associations and youth organisations
Its strength lies in helping these actors work together, using a shared language and shared tools.
4. How and when to use it
The toolkit is designed to be flexible. Cities can use it at different stages of their journey:
Starting out: to map the current school food system, identify gaps, and build a coalition.
Designing interventions: to select evidence‑based actions, from menu reformulation to procurement changes or food education.
Piloting and scaling: to structure experiments, monitor progress, and evaluate impact.
Embedding change: to align policies, budgets, and governance structures for long‑term transformation.
It works best when used in multi‑stakeholder workshops, strategic planning sessions, or cross‑departmental meetings.
5. Why it matters
Healthy school meals are one of the most effective levers for improving children’s health, reducing inequalities, and strengthening local food systems. The toolkit helps cities move from isolated actions to coordinated, systemic change, ensuring that every child has access to nutritious, appealing, and sustainable meals.
