Christmas by the numbers: How Dolce served festive cheer to schools in 2025

Christmas dinner is one of the favourite moments in the school meals calendar. It’s a day pupils look forward, and one our teams love delivering.

And for Christmas 2025, we served an incredible 97,165 traditional turkey Christmas dinners to pupils across the country, alongside 10,000 vegetarian Christmas dinners – making sure everyone could enjoy the celebrations, whatever their preference.

To put that into perspective, our kitchens prepared:

• Around 11,000kg of roast potatoes
• 4,500kg of carrots
• 4,500kg of peas
• 2,500kg of Brussels sprouts

That’s a lot of peeling, roasting, and perfect seasoning – all delivered with the care and quality we pride ourselves on.
We currently cater for over 650 schools, reaching 1 in every 20 schools in England – and Christmas dinner day is when that scale really comes to life. From early-morning prep to the final plates served, our teams work together to make sure every child feels part of something special.

Neil Price, Head of Food Services here at Dolce says: “Christmas is without doubt one of our favourite times of the school year. There’s something really special about seeing pupils enjoy a traditional Christmas meal together, and knowing the role our teams play in creating that experience. The scale of what we deliver is huge, but it’s all worthwhile.”

A big thank you to all the headteachers and school staff who got involved in serving the thousands of Christmas dinners to the school communities we serve.

Here’s to another festive season served the Dolce way!
The Dolce team

We also ran our annual Christmas contest again this year, click here to see the winner, runners up and locate our social media in order to stay in the loop with Dolce.