This half-term, we are a catering team that specialises in creating outdoor dining experiences that can be enjoyed by all! Our first job was to create our portfolio. We thought about our favourite foods…" 

And then we thought about how these meals could be adapted so they could be eaten on the go!

Meanwhile, the people who run the Boathouse Café at the Arrow Valley Lake had a problem. The popular café was struggling to keep up with demand – they were so busy that they had to turn customers away and people were waiting a long time for their food. They started investigating ways to expand their services and offer food for people to enjoy outdoors. One of the managers had heard about our work and called us in for a meeting.

At the meeting, the representatives from the Boathouse explained their problem and asked if we would be able to help them set up a new catering unit somewhere within the grounds of Arrow Valley Lake. After some discussion, we decided that we would love to take on the job!

To help us decide what food to sell and where the catering van should go, we created an online survey to find out more about the local community’s opinions on Arrow Valley Lake and what they like to do when they visit. We also looked at maps and photographs and used drama to speak with people who remembered the lake being built in the early 1970s.

We thought about what would make a ‘good’ location and came up with a list of criteria. We all agreed that the location needed to be busy with lots of people walking past, have no graffiti or litter, offer lots of space with wide footpaths, provide a nice view, and have places for people to sit and enjoy their food. We decided on seven areas around Arrow Valley Lake that we thought might be good locations for the catering van, then went to investigate these places during a trip to the lake.

While we were at the lake, we visited each of the seven places we had identified on the map and scored them out of 10 based on each of the criteria we had come up with. When we got back to school, we added up all the scores, and the location that received the highest score was location 2!

Now that we had our location sorted, we needed to think about what food we wanted to sell. The results from our survey had shown that pizza was a very popular choice, so we decided to investigate what made a ‘good’ pizza. For that, we needed to get cooking!

Our pizzas were very delicious! We all agreed that a pizza needs to have a tasty base, tomato sauce, and lots of cheese.

We then started thinking about what base would be the best for the pizza we wanted to sell in our catering van. We tried five different bread products to help us decide – bread, tortilla wrap, bread roll, pitta, and a bagel – and in our groups, we chose our favourite.

Next, we began thinking about the final designs for our pizzas. We looked at lots of different toppings and then, in our teams, came up with the ones we thought would make an interesting and delicious treat, while making sure we kept the costs low enough so that we didn’t have to charge too much.

It was time to get cooking again!

Now that we had sorted our menu for our food truck, we began to think about how we would let people visiting the lake know where we were located. We thought about using social media, making posters, and putting up signs, but we were still worried that the public wouldn’t know where to find us, as the lake is a very big place. One of the children mentioned that they had recently been to some woods where they followed a trail around the area to find secret locations – we thought this sounded like a great idea!

From our market research, we knew that the play park was one of the most popular places for the public to visit, so we decided to create a trail from there to our catering van’s location.

We made model pizzas out of clay, which we placed along the pathways from the park to our van’s location – the public would need to follow our trail of pizzas to find our van, where they could buy some tasty pizzas of their own!