About Us — Caring Cooks Of Jersey

Our story

Caring Cooks is a Jersey charity and registered NPO, that specifically supports families with children of school age. We strongly believe that good food and nutrition from the weaning stage, right through a child’s life is of crucial importance and we want to support parents in making healthy food a part of daily life.

All of our services are free of charge to families and are funded by charitable donations.

Caring Cooks of Jersey was brought to life by one Mum’s mission to help local people in need by cooking an extra meal for a family who were struggling due to ill health or financial difficulties, so that they could sit down and eat a nutritious home cooked meal together. This caring cook was Melissa Nobrega our founder and former CEO of our charity. Caring Cooks has gone from strength to strength and we are now celebrating 10 years of hard work in striving to empower the children and young people of our beautiful Island to better understand nutrition and improve their future health.

As Melissa became aware of the many people who were struggling to feed their families, the Weekly Meal Service was born. This is a programme which dramatically scaled up the initial idea of cooking a meal for a family in need. In 2014, a keen network of volunteers was recruited, and partnerships were developed with referrers from across the Island.

The Weekly Meal Service is still going strong and our team of volunteers work with our chefs to prepare and deliver a two-course meal to families facing hardship every Saturday.

Melissa Nobrega, Founder of Caring Cooks of Jersey

April 2016 saw the unveiling of the Kitchen Garden Project in local schools. We wanted children to understand where food came from and how it was grown, in the hope that by taking an active role in growing and picking fresh fruit and vegetables, a desire to cook and eat a wider range of food would be ignited.

Just one year later in 2017, we were able to launch the Let’s Get Cooking programme, an incredible project, which has had a huge impact on many families throughout Jersey.

We strongly believe that equipping children with the knowledge and skills that they need to prepare healthy meals has a significant and long-term positive impact on their health. Having confidence in the kitchen empowers children to live healthier lives. The statistics support our intuition.

89% of children try at least one new food they wouldn’t have otherwise eaten

71% of children have a positive change in their eating habits

61% of families use the recipes at home, to cook with their children

100% of Headteachers agree that the programme has had a positive effect on children’s reading, writing, numeracy, confidence and motivation.

In 2019, we were incredibly proud to present Flourish, our initiative to bring hot lunches to the state primary schools of Jersey for the first time ever.

Incredibly, as many as 1000 school children in Jersey go without a hot meal on a daily basis, which is why we partnered with the Government to kickstart a pilot to bring hot food to children, every lunchtime. We launched initially in Janvrin and Samares schools, but owing to the success of the project, we now also providing lunches to children at St Luke’s, St Martins and St Peters. schools.

Flourish helps to ensure that the Island’s children are receiving the nutrition they need, using local food wherever possible and reducing the impact that single use plastic from lunch boxes has on our fragile environment.

2020 saw Flourish reach an even bigger audience as we won the tender to provide lunches to five secondary schools. Despite the challenges posed by the global pandemic, we are now successfully providing a wide range of hot and cold snacks, as well as meals, to hundreds of secondary school children across six schools.