The Company

Qualità & Servizi is a joint-stock company founded in 1996. We are a 100% public company, owned by the municipalities of Sesto Fiorentino, Campi Bisenzio, Signa, Calenzano, Carmignano and Barberino di Mugello.

One main cooking centre and two smaller ones in Calenzano and Carmignano

The main cooking centre produces about 7,500 meals a day for about 70 supply terminals located in the municipalities of Campi Bisenzio, Sesto Fiorentino, Signa and Barberino di Mugello (day care centres, nurseries, primary schools). In addition to the main one, there are two other smaller cooking centres: one in Calenzano, which prepares and dispatches about 1,000 meals per day heading to the schools in the Municipality of Calenzano, and another one in Carmignano producing and delivering about 800 meals per day for schools in the Municipality of Carmignano.

Nine cooking centres in municipal nurseries

Every one of the nine nurseries around the municipalities of Campi Bisenzio, Sesto Fiorentino, Signa, Barberino di Mugello and Calenzano has a small in-house cooking centre run by a Quality and Services cook.

Villa Solaria RSA cooking centre

Another cooking centre is located inside the retirement home Villa Solaria (Sesto Fiorentino), with about 70 guests

The goals of Qualità & Servizi

Good gastronomy is central to the service. Operating as a catering company to distribute high organoleptic and nutritional quality meals to schools.
Enhance and promote the land by choosing local suppliers and raw materials.
Undertake a new model able to operate responsibly at a socio-environmental level, considering food as a component of well-being not only physically, but also for the person as a whole, and as a vehicle of education and development.
Enriching the service with a unique added value: not just producing good food, but also, through it, educating about life, thanks to workshops with children and training courses for parents and teachers.
Create a real food community, in which everyone is engaged to achieve the goal: food as the basis of human and environmental well-being!

The ethical values behind our idea of school catering

Agroecology and short supply chain

Qualità & Servizi is aware of the fundamental role that mass catering can play in protecting the local territory, gastronomic tradition and the environment in general. For this reason, our raw materials are chosen according to the criteria of territoriality (Municipality - Province – Region – Nation) and quality, respecting the cardinal principle of Slow Food:

"Good, clean and fair"

Carlo Petrini, Slow Food Publisher

First principle: «Good Food»

Goodness: the cornerstone on which our project as a Food Community rests.
Our primary goal is the goodness of the dishes we offer to the children and the identification of the best ways to achieve it.

Second principle: «Clean Food»

local origin
from short supply chain
from extensive and non-intensive livestock farming
organic
from fair trade markets (via verified projects)
seasonal
transported with a low packaging and reusable containers

Third principle: «Fair Food»

All our productions are aimed at recognising the economic value of products purchased from local producers, through a fair and shared price that must be compatible with the economic sustainability of our production costs.
All this must be within the price that the municipalities recognize to our job.

TABLET PROJECT: Satisfaction Monitoring

As a part of the European and national scenario increasingly fighting against food waste, Qualità e Servizi, conscious of being a part of an industry in which food waste can be huge, developed a strategical project to prevent the wasting and, in a broader sense, an educational project teaching people how to attribute food the right value.

Qualità e Servizi has developed a specific software that enables to measure the two parameters representing food waste in schools:

userved food, that is food cooked but not served;
plate waste, that is food cooked, served but not eaten

The software is installed on tablets that supplied to the Q&S workers in every school: they insert the parameters of unserved food and plate waste for every single class, so we can have real-time data and a capillary detection of children’s taste.

Nutrition Education

Food education workshops ‘Il gusto del sapere'

Fish workshop: ‘The Fish Season”
Fruits workshop: “How Sweet!”
Herbs workshop: “5 Herbs For 5 Senses“
Vegetable workshop: “Colors Of The Nature”
Food Pyramid workshop: “Step By Step”
Legumes workshop: “Discovering Legumes”
Food Waste workshop: – “Don’t Waste The Food”

Slow Food Collaboration

Three-year 'Ti v'olio bene' training project
Three-year 'Kitchen Garden in Conduct’ training project
International Alliance of Slow Food cooks
Use of Slow Food Presidium products

Teachers Training and Canteen Commission

Qualità e Servizi made available its professional kwnoledge to organize food education training courses, addressed to teachers and parents of the Canteen Commission.
Courses have a multidisciplinary approach in order to talk about infant feeding by different points of view: human health and revention, environment health and defense, social and psycho-pedagogical aspects.

The goal of the courses is to give teachers and parents an higher sensitivity and awareness towards feed and a tool to transmit food colture to children.

Current courses:

A canteen to educate. Training course for teacher: Goal: make canteen a place for food education.
Educamensa: training course for canteen commission members and parents and teachers involved in the refactory service.
Journey in alimentary function in children between 0 and 36 months old. Addressed to nursery school workers, teachers and aducators, specially for 0-12 months old age. The cours gives informations about weaning in order to make the feeding time more paceful and aware.