Community
230 plates at PaKachele
On a Thursday afternoon in July, our team set up a food station at PaKachele Community School along Zambezi Road and served lunch to around 230 children. Here is what happened, and why we keep going back to this kind of work.
24 July 2026 · Lusaka, Zambia
230
Children Served
3
Items Per Plate
2 hrs
On Site
1
School, Close to Home
On 24 July 2026, our team drove out along Zambezi Road to PaKachele Community School, unloaded crates, and set up a food station in the yard.
By half past twelve the school had assembled. Our founder, Simon Bowa, spoke briefly to the children. Andrew Matipa offered a blessing over the meal. And then, for a little over an hour, we did the only thing a food company is really qualified to do at a school: we fed people.
Around 230 children ate that afternoon. Every plate carried three things, all made in our own factory a few kilometres up the road.
- A mini pizza
- A sausage roll
- A deli item
Lunch service at PaKachele Community School, Zambezi Road.
Why food, specifically
Corporate giving often arrives as a cheque and a photograph. We are not against either — but we make food for a living, and the most honest thing we can offer a community is the thing we are actually good at.
A hungry child does not learn well. That is not a sentiment; it is one of the most consistently documented findings in education research anywhere in the world. A school lunch is a small intervention with a disproportionate effect on whether a morning of teaching lands.
PaKachele is close to us. The children we served are growing up in the same city our team goes home to, in many cases in the same neighbourhoods. There was nothing abstract about the afternoon.
What it looked like
Our people came in branded shirts, which mattered less for the branding than for the fact that a company showing up together looks like a company that meant to be there. We served. We sat with the children. We talked to their teachers. We packed up at two o’clock and drove back to the factory.
It was not a complicated day. Most of the useful ones are not.
⚠ Content needed: confirm the speaker for this quote before publishing.
“We make food. When a school near us needs food, the maths is not difficult.”
Roan Foods & Brands
What happens next
⚠ Content needed: confirm before publishing — this paragraph assumes PaKachele is an ongoing commitment rather than a one-off. “PaKachele was not a one-off gesture, and we do not intend to treat it as one. We are building this into a regular part of how Roan Foods & Brands operates, working with schools and community organisations near our facility.”
If you are doing this work too
We would like to hear from schools, community organisations and companies working on food security and child nutrition in Lusaka — to coordinate an outreach, to tell us where the need is greatest, or to join one of ours.