A NEW low-carbon centre to produce Bradford's school meals is now up and running - but has ended up costing £300,000 more than its budget.

The Food Innovation and Production Centre is run by Bradford Council and is, based at Mitre Court, off Cutler Heights Lane.

It replaces the District's existing facility in Laisterdyke, which was the Council's third most energy consuming building until it shut.

The budget for the Mitre Court centre was £1.7m, but Bradford Council has acknowledged that the work came in over budget due to the global increase in construction costs.

Rising costs of materials such as steel have led to a number of Council construction and regeneration schemes spiralling in cost in recent months.

Because of this overspend, the Council's Executive will have to approve £300,000 additional funding for the project when it meets early next month.

The Council says this overspend will be offset by the fact that the former site in Laisterdyke has been sold for £750,000.

In 1907 Bradford became the first ever place in the country to provide council-funded school meals at Green Lane Primary School. The school kitchen at the time used the same boiler that heated the school’s swimming pool.

The new 21st century centre will provide meals for around 30,000 school children, and was created through re-purposing an existing council building.

The facility is now energy efficient and the building footprint is a quarter of the size of the previous, much larger, building in Laisterdyke. This also means that it will be cheaper to heat, maintain and clean.

A Council spokesman said: "All aspects of the food’s journey, from preparation to plate have been carefully considered in a comprehensive re-engineering of the whole process to address the environmental impact of the catering operations.

"Hi-tech cooking gadgetry allows foods to be perfectly cooked in a fraction of the time it would have taken with previous generation equipment.

"For example, two new commercial cooking kettles will do the work of the ten previously used Bratt Pans (industrial-size cooking appliances), and they can cook food in a fraction of the time, so they can be washed and reused more times in a day. The older Bratt Pans took three to four hours to stew diced meat for a Halal curry, while the two new highly sophisticated iVario cooking centres will pressure cook the same volume of meat in 45 minutes.

"The new blast chiller freezers save energy due to their reduced freezing and chilling times, and are more friendly to the environment. In addition, there are highly effective heat recovery systems in place that take waste heat from the blast chiller freezers and use it to heat the building’s hot water."

It is estimated that the total energy savings of the centre will amount to £40,000 per year, but the savings are likely to increase to around £60,000, once next year’s anticipated energy prices are taken into account.

The new FIPC has also enabled a significant reduction in labour hours of nearly 25 per cent. In addition, the streamlining of the logistics process to make it more efficient has enabled the service to reduce its delivery vans from three down to two.

Councillor Alex Ross-Shaw, Portfolio Holder for Regeneration, Transport and Planning, said: “The resources of the old central production unit and its hard working school catering staff have been called upon on many times in the past, from supporting the World Curry Festival to providing emergency feeding for children during the pandemic.

“Looking to the future, Bradford now has a superb catering facility that will provide local school children with high-quality, healthy meals for many years to come. It is particularly gratifying to see how teams across the Council have worked together to address what was previously one of our highest energy consuming buildings, creating a modern, efficient operation that now aligns with our objectives of helping to create a greener and more sustainable future for the district.”