We are so proud to have been awarded the Brighton and Hove City Council ‘Healthy Choice Award’. We have been working with our chefs to develop new menus and striving to source the best local suppliers in order to meet the Healthy Choice criteria. These requirements include valuing wholefoods over ultra processed foods, reducing red meat and added sugars, and eliminating the use of poor quality oils. We now only use pure oils. In Sussex we use approved local suppliers that have good ethics on their supplier chain to promote sustainability by minimising the amount of packaging, mass production and carbon footprint of our business.

The strategy for this scheme is produced by Brighton and Hove Food Partnership, who are a non-profit organisation helping people learn to cook, access a healthy diet, grow their own food and waste less food. They also recommend local food shops and veg boxes, plus support food banks to help fuel our city. Our director Kate spent some time with Martina, who manages the Healthy Choice Scheme, to learn more about how we could adapt our menus to make a range of healthy choice commitments by serving nourishing and well-balanced meals.

Meeting the criteria and achieving the award means that we give the customer choice and ALWAYS commit to providing food and drink menus with plenty of healthy choices. This award tied in really nicely with Kate’s studies, and achieving a Nutrition and Health Coaching qualification with the International Institute of Nutrition & Health, which enables us to analyse the ingredients we use. Being educated about why prioritising wholefoods and approved local suppliers helps us to value healthier choices and avoid using ultra processed foods in our menus. We know that if the label has more than 5 ingredients on it and includes anything you wouldn’t have in your kitchen cupboard, it is classified as ultra processed and is not used in any stage of our food preparations or cooking wherever possible. We much prefer to use fresh and natural local ingredients to provide our customers with a healthier and more flavoursome experience, compared to the traditional fast food truck. So, not only are our menus delicious and nutritious, but they have all been well-considered when it comes to the health benefits of different food groups.

For example, when making our Gourmet Burgers for our street food menus, we use our local butcher to make the patties, they provide good quality meats that make our burgers banging! Same goes for our Gourmet Hotdogs, Manny makes those two! Our burger buns and giant hotdog rolls are also freshly baked by our carefully chosen baker. We have tried most of the local bakeries in Brighton now, and have finally found the one that suits our ingredient needs and tastes the best! We believe not only that the ingredients should be fresh wholefoods (not filled with preservatives) but also that we should buy from local and independent suppliers as much as we possibly can.

We are also implementing our healthy choice menus across all the catering projects and contracts we commit to, including for our festival crew catering clients. Festivals are set in fields in remote locations with little immediate access to shopping for the crew, so we believe that both the festival organisers and the caterer have a duty of care towards providing healthy options in the crew food menus. We always create menus that cater for all dietary requirements and religious/ cultural options, but the energy that festival crew need for working long hard days is so important both to the individual themselves, but also to the productivity of the festival team. Therefore we strive to provide healthy options with all meals, and sustenance that fuels performance! For 56 consecutive days catering at Glastonbury Festival in 2025 we fed the festival crew breakfast, lunch and dinner, so we structured our menus to try and hit the best balance of the three macro nutrients, protein, fat and carbohydrate, but also offer a good selection of fibre, plenty of plants!

Having made a commitment to tackle the ever increasing ultra processed foods in our food chain by using as many wholefoods that our ancestors used to grow, bake fresh, and rear, we’ve designed some new menus for festivals, weddings and private events for 2026 which we are very excited to share. So, if you’d like to enquire about event catering, please get in touch, we’d love to hear from you! Old Skool Bus Events