How-to Guide
Great British Menu Champion inspires new school food resource
BBC champion chef Amber Francis brings weekly ingredient challenge to schools nationwide.
Amber Francis, BBC Great British Menu Champion of Champions 2025, is taking a simple idea from a north London school dining hall to classrooms across the country.
Inspired and backed by Amber, we’ve launched Try Something New Day: a free toolkit to help primary and secondary schools run weekly ingredient tastings during breaktime. The concept is deliberately simple: no classroom time and no extra budget required.
Francis devised the initiative after swapping fine dining for school food. Following roles at The Ritz London and The Dairy, and opening Michelin Guide-listed Maene, she became Head Chef and Senior Food Educator at Christ’s College Finchley in 2023.
Each Tuesday, she wheels a trolley into the dining hall and invites students to taste a new ingredient, from different tomato varieties to kohlrabi and pomelo. There’s no pressure to eat; smelling or touching counts.
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Speaking to BBC Bristol about how it all began she said:
“I was working in a school with teenagers and finding it was really hard to get those young people to be brave eaters and to try something different, that they might not have come across before, and one of the best ways I found was to simply stand in the canteen, table in front of me, with a different ingredient every single week, and by offering it for free there was a no lose solution: they could try it if they wanted, they didn’t have to, they could look at it, smell it, and it really started a conversation going which was amazing.”
The campaign comes as the Government tightens restrictions on junk food advertising, with organisers arguing that limiting unhealthy options must be matched by greater access to real, nutritious ingredients.
Backed by emerging research in the journal Appetite highlighting the benefits of sensory food education, we hope the project will broaden tastes and horizons.
“Food education doesn’t have to sit in a classroom,” says our co-founder Nicole Pisani, formerly Head Chef at NOPI. “A simple addition to lunch or breaktime can make a lasting difference.”
Free resource packs are now available for schools nationwide, download here.