Free school meal vouchers - ideas please for how to spend them?

[KombuchaHauntsYourBurps]

DS is at a specialist school that doesn't have a kitchen, and we have just been told that I'm going to get vouchers in lieu of the FSM he would get in a mainstream school.

But... The vouchers will come once a term and have to be spent all in one go - you can't just spend part of one. The LA have said that they can and do check what they are being spent on and that it must be foods for the child's packed lunches. I'm also owed for last term due to it taking a while to sort out when DS moved schools, so the first voucher is for nearly £200.

I can only spend them in certain supermarkets that aren't the one I usually go to - I'm taking the first voucher to the Big Tesco and need to spend the whole sum at once on packed lunch food. We don't have a big fridge or any freezer space (we freeze a lot of fruit and soups etc so it's always rammed). In fact the kitchen itself is pretty small! So it's got to be ambient stuff, but nothing too bulky. Oh and DS doesn't eat meat or fish, or anything even slightly spicy/curry flavoured, anything cheesy (other than plain cheese which he does like) and obviously the school is nut-free. We eat mostly home cooked food, lots of pulses, grains, pasta, fruit and veg, home made cake, that sort of thing, and generally try to avoid UPFs (but I'm not super strict about that). His school lunches are usually either a cream cheese sandwich/slice of homemade fruit cake/tub of chopped tomatoes and cucumber/packet of snackajacks or a flask of homemade soup/bread roll/slice of cake.

I'm thinking to bulk buy decent cereal bars (the ones made with just fruit and oats) and snackajacks but what else?? Ideas very welcome as I'm a bit stumped on how to do this, ideally I'd just spend the voucher on a massive shop to last a fortnight, stocking up on things like washing powder etc, and then just buy the lunch stuff as I go along but apparently that's not allowed 😬

It will be redeeming the value you can only do once. You should then have the vouchers in your store account. Almost like a bank account. When you check out you can choose to pay using your account credit or your debit card. Logically you would spend this first on your usual food shops because it won't let you select to only spend vouchers on your packed lunch stuff and then pay for other food separately.

We buy mini long life chocolate and strawberry milks for kids lunches. In the warmer months I chuck 6 in the freezer then pop into lunch boxes as an ice brick.

Individual fruit salads in juice.
Shelf stable cheese dip and crackers.

Bear in mind that the LA person might not fully understand how the scheme works and have a limited imagination about what can go into a packed lunch.

So if it turns out that you can use the code to buy gift cards for Tesco, Asda etc, you just use the code to buy card(s) for whichever supermarket suits you best then you can use in dribs drabs for whatever food you choose.

After all, you could be making fruit cake, pasta salad, hummus, bean salad, etc etc and it's unlikely they're going to cross reference what food he turns up with against what you bought and ask who ate his missing raisins and tinned tuna.

They're not going to be expecting you to spend hundreds of pounds on bread, cheese, ham and crisps and then not be able to store them for the months it would take to get through on his lunches.