For schools looking to take the conversation further, Making Friends with Food® offers a whole-school approach combining student incursions, parent seminars, teacher development and ongoing resources.
The approach is non-judgemental, engaging and designed to help school communities build positive relationships with food. An independent 2024 evaluation by the University of Southern Queensland found that the program uses simple, relatable messages and a supportive approach.
Making Friends with Food® is a whole-school partnership program, providing a long-term, relationship-led approach to food literacy for students, teachers and families. The Mad Food Science Incursion™ sits at the heart of the partnership program and is the catalyst for sparking conversations, that are then continued and weaved through the schools’ plans.
Rather than a one-off visit, a dedicated Certified Instructor works with your school over a year or multiple years, layering in-person workshops, classroom resources and online learning to build lasting behaviour change.
Outside of the incursion, the school leads what they want to focus on. The Certified Instructor has tools to help schools to think about the areas they would like to address, and together they develop a plan of what that will look like each term. This isn’t about adding more to a teachers to-do list, it’s about what simple ways the key messages about food and wellbeing can be integrated into what the school already has planned. For instance, at Holy Name Primary School, with the help of their Certified Instructor, they turned their annual Art Show into a Health and Wellness Art Show with each year group being given a different them to bring to their art. At Gowrie State School, they wanted to introduce a school garden and with the support of their Certified Instructor, our key message of eating a rainbow was extended into their school garden.
The partnership program was independently evaluated by the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) in 2024, and found to genuinely shift school food culture over time.
In 2023 it was recognised by the Murrumbidgee Primary Health Network for Promoting Healthy Living. As one teacher put it during the evaluation: “to have the same person four years in a row, and to have them be so fantastic — it sounds like that’s really important.”
That consistency is the heart of why Making Friends with Food® works.
Some of the other results from the USQ evaluation found the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, it had a holistic – whole-school approach, used simple, relatable messages and a non-judgemental, supportive approach.
