Parents want to provide their children with a healthy lifestyle and a balanced diet, and one of the challenges is the school lunch. 85% of parents in urban areas say they usually pack a school lunch for their children and 86% of them say they do it every day, the latest iSense Solutions survey shows.
45% of those who say they don’t give their children a packed lunch say they give them pocket money to buy food on the way to school or during breaks, and 37% say they eat when they leave home and when they return.
Parents take care and responsibility for their little ones’ diets, and the routine of preparing the next day’s packet happens for different reasons: 63% of parents feel more reassured when they know exactly what their child is eating, 36% think it is good for children to have a snack between meals, 32% want to reduce the consumption of processed foods in their child’s diet, 28% say it is cheaper, and 25% say that school time overlaps with mealtimes, especially among children over 15 (36%), who spend slightly more time at school.
What do students in Romania get in a package?
When it comes to the contents of the packet that children have recently received at school, the most popular foods are: sandwich (76%), fruit (47%), biscuits/napolitane (22%), cereal/chocolate/fruit and seed bars (22%), vegetables/salad (17%), pastries (15%), homemade sweet or salty cakes/biscuits (11%), nuts/nuts (8%), egg/omelette (7%).
The favorite foods that parents choose to put in their sandwich are: cheese/cheeses (82%), cold meats (71%), sausages (71%), schnitzel (49%), butter (49%), vegetables (36%), pâté (24%), jam (14%), cold roast (14%) and fish (7%).
“Urban parents are concerned about the health and nutrition of their children and try to provide them with regular meals, as diversified as possible. Even if they have at their fingertips different types of foods and processed foods, it is rewarding that they predominantly choose dairy products, fruits and vegetables, which provide their children with a healthy lifestyle”, says Alina Zelezneac, Quantitative Research Director, iSense Solutions.
To complete the package, 85% of parents say they give their children water, tea (18%), yogurt/health or kefir (12%), fruit/vegetable juice or smoothies (9%), milk (5%) or lemonade (8%).
Parents say they pay about 95 lei a week for their children’s lunch packs.
But how much pocket money do Romanian students have?
55% of urban internet-using parents say they also give their children pocket money. A third say they give their children less than 10 lei a day, while half say they give their children between 10-20 lei a day.
The percentage of parents who give pocket money increases in direct proportion to the age of their children, with around 79% of parents with children aged 15-17 doing so.
The data are part of the iSense Solutions Omnibus, a weekly survey representative of the urban Internet-using population. The survey was conducted from January 31 to February 7 on a sample of 363 parents, maximum margin of error +/- 5.1% at 95% confidence level.