North Yorkshire County Council has introduced new labelling technology to help schools cut costs and promote healthy eating.

The system, developed by Sheffield-based retail and solutions specialist FormKraft, also helps keep pupils on-site during breaks, by offering informative packaging on the 350,000 packaged sandwiches, salads, fruit and meals sold each year.

The equipment is helping to streamline labelling on sandwiches and other products in North Yorkshire's school dining halls and save around £10,000 over the next three years.

Under the previous system, food labelling and descriptions were printed in bulk at the start of the year and sent out to each location.

But this led to waste, as labels for less popular products were never used and prices could not be included in case they went up during the year.

The system resulted in waste, ineffective hand-written labelling and an inability to easily introduce new food ranges.

Now, printers and keyboards located at each of the 32 outlets across the county, allow staff to access centrally-created labelling and print out what is required to meet local demand.

Nick Postma, deputy manager of County Caterers, said: "The new system encourages trials of speciality sandwiches and a range which is encouraging staff and pupils to eat more regularly in the canteen as, if staff eat with us by choice, more pupils tend to follow suit.

"We can easily introduce more varieties of bread and healthier options in a slick, well labelled, quality controlled manner – for example, using a slogan such as 'On Your Way To Five A Day'.

"This is leading to an increase in sales of healthy options and we are ahead of the game and more efficient as a result."

The catering service has invested £20,000 setting up the new system.

Simon Lindsell, director of FormKraft Distribution Limited, added: "This was a challenging project but we believe the solution we have delivered for North Yorkshire is something that can be adopted across the country.

"North Yorkshire's school catering service has 32 outlets across its area, which were part of this project and was finding it difficult to control both its product range and the overheads associated with labelling them.

"The bespoke system we have devised is easy to use on the ground and gives the service's managers much more control over processes.

"It also helps the service's outlets compete with its competitors who are already using similar systems to this."