Supplying Poultry to Schools and Hospitals in Ghana

A school kitchen asks about the holidays before it asks the price

The first question a school bursar or kitchen manager asks is rarely the price. It is what happens in the long vacation. Can you still deliver in August? Who is paying the birds if the school is closed for six weeks? Do you have a second buyer lined up for the birds that would otherwise sit in the house? A farm that answers those three questions well has usually won the contract before the price is discussed.

Schools and hospitals are different buyers, and they run on different calendars. A school follows the term, the feeding days and the holidays. A hospital follows patient numbers and a diet sheet that a dietitian signs. Both can be good customers. Both can drop you at the first missed delivery if you do not understand how they buy. Festive weeks add their own pressure, which our festive demand planning guide covers in more detail.

In our view, the institution is seldom the real risk. The timing is. Most small farms that lose a school or hospital account do not lose it on price or quality. They lose it because a delivery was late on a feeding day, and the kitchen had to buy from a market trader at short notice.

Term calendars: why a school buys in lumps, not a steady line

A school does not eat chicken at a steady rate across the year. It eats chicken on a few days, at a few times, and the rest of the year it eats very little. A boarding school may want a feed of chicken once or twice a term. A day school may want it on Fridays only. A hospital, by contrast, may want a steady weekly count, with extra on public holidays when visiting numbers change.

That lumpiness is the hard part for a broiler farm. A broiler takes roughly seven to eight weeks from chick to market weight, plus the cleaning and rest of the house before the next batch. If a school wants 100 birds on the first Friday of every month, you cannot raise that from one house. A single house gives you one batch every eight weeks or so, and the school's demand comes around every four.

So a lumpy contract means planning in batches, not in birds. The way we would set it up is in the worked example further down. The short version is this: a monthly school order on an eight-week cycle needs two houses working in turns, and a term-only order can often be filled from one house if you stagger the chicks carefully.

Ask the school for its calendar before you quote. Get the term dates, the feeding days, the exam weeks when the canteen runs lighter, and the holiday closures. A kitchen that gives you its calendar is a kitchen that wants a supplier. A kitchen that will not give you a calendar is one to approach carefully.

Hospital kitchens buy to a diet sheet, not to a taste test

A hospital kitchen does not buy chicken the way a restaurant does. It buys to the diet sheet. The sheet names the cut, the weight, whether the skin stays on, and sometimes the texture that suits a patient who has trouble chewing. A ward kitchen that receives a bird with too much fat or uneven pieces does not argue about flavour. It rejects the lot and writes a note.

Ask for the diet sheet before you price anything. Ask who signs it, and whether it changes by ward. Some hospitals want skinless breast and thigh for certain patients and whole birds for staff canteens. Some want the bird jointed in a particular way. You cannot guess these things from the market, and a supplier who guesses will be sent back.

Keep one more rule in mind. Anything you deliver to a hospital will be handled by people who are sick or recovering. The clean-room standard in a hospital kitchen is higher than in a school canteen, so the boxes, the knives and the cool room need to be cleaner than your own kitchen would need to be. That is not a cost you can skip.

The paperwork a procurement officer will ask for, and what to have ready

Public schools and most government hospitals buy through a procurement process. That can mean a formal tender, a request for quotes, or a short list of approved suppliers that the procurement office reviews each year. Each route asks for paperwork before it asks for chicken. Find out which route applies before you spend a week on a price schedule that nobody will open.

Gather these before the first call. Your business registration, your tax registration and your current tax clearance certificate are the first things most offices ask for. Keep a bank account in the business name, a physical address the officer can visit, and a contact who answers the phone. Ask the procurement officer for the exact list. Requirements differ between institutions and between years, and we would rather you ask than assume.

• Business registration and tax registration documents
• A current tax clearance certificate
• A price schedule with prices per bird, per kilogram or per portion, as the office asks
• Delivery terms, including the day, the time and the place
• A sample of the product, or a visit to the farm, if the office asks for one
• Bank details for payment, in the business name only

If you are still deciding how to set up as a grower, our partner page is the place to start the conversation before you write the paperwork.

A price schedule is not a sales letter. Write each line the way the buyer will read it. If the kitchen buys by the kilogram, price by the kilogram, and say whether the figure is live or dressed weight. Mixing the two in one schedule is the fastest way to get it sent back.

Halal slaughter, and the record that has to travel with the bird

Some institutions ask for halal-slaughtered birds, and the requirement is common enough in Ghana that it should be on your checklist from the first meeting. If the buyer needs it, the slaughter has to be done in a way the buyer accepts, and there has to be a record that shows it. The record is what the buyer will check when a question comes up, not the bird.

The simplest record we would keep is a slip for each batch. It should show the date, the batch or house it came from, the number of birds, who did the slaughter, the time, and the weight at delivery. Keep a copy for yourself and sign the buyer's copy at the kitchen door. For the wider hygiene and packing side of dressed birds, see our dressing and selling guide. A slip that a buyer can read in ten seconds does more for a contract than a long letter about your intentions.

Ask the institution who will check the slaughter, and whether they want to see the place where it was done. Some buyers will accept a written statement. Others will send someone to look. Find out before the first delivery, not after a complaint.

Live weight, dressing and the portion: what the kitchen will weigh

A live bird and a dressed bird are two different products. A broiler sold live at about 2.5 kilograms loses a substantial share of that weight once feathers, head, feet and the offal are removed. How much depends on how the bird is cut and whether the buyer wants the giblets back in the pack. A kitchen that buys by the kilogram of cooked meat is buying a different thing again, because bone and skin come off in the pot.

Work out the dressed weight with the kitchen before you agree a price. Ask whether the price is per bird, per dressed kilogram or per portion. If they say per portion, ask how big the portion is in grams and whether that is cooked or raw. A kitchen that cannot answer those questions will usually take the figure that suits it on the day, and you will be the one who absorbs the difference.

Our starting price for a live broiler is GH₵110, and a dressed broiler is listed at GH₵120, but those are for individual sales and do not stop you agreeing a different figure for an institution. The point is to price the bird the buyer receives, and to put the weight on the slip.

Keeping dressed birds cold between the slab and the pot

A dressed bird that leaves the slab at nine in the morning and reaches a school kitchen at two in the afternoon has spent five hours in a hot market van, unless someone has planned otherwise. Chill it, pack it in clean boxes with ice in sealed bags, and keep the boxes off the floor of the van. Ice is cheap compared with a rejected batch and a sick child.

Use a food-grade cool box for anything going further than the next street. Keep the raw birds separate from the packing materials, and keep the knives and boards dedicated to the job. Wash hands and change gloves between birds. These sound like small things until a kitchen finds one bird with a smell, and then the whole delivery is rejected.

1. Chill the birds to cold storage before loading, and check the temperature with a probe thermometer.
2. Pack in clean, food-grade boxes lined with ice in sealed bags, not loose ice that melts into the meat.
3. Load the cool box last and keep it in the shade of the van, not the sun on the tailgate.
4. Deliver to the kitchen by the time agreed, and ask the kitchen to sign the slip with the time on it.

Worked example: 100 birds a month for a boarding school

Take a boarding school that wants 100 dressed birds on the first Friday of each month. That is one order a month, but the birds have to be in the house about eight weeks before it. The arithmetic goes like this.

An eight-week cycle with a week of cleaning and rest between batches means one house can turn out a batch every nine weeks or so. A monthly order is about every four and a half weeks. So you need two houses in turn, each filling the gap the other leaves. If you have only one house, you will either miss months or hold birds that the school does not want yet, and held birds cost feed every day.

Now the chicks. You need about 100 birds at the kitchen, plus a small margin for losses. Two boxes of 50 gives you exactly 100 chicks, which leaves no room for a dead bird on the way or in the first week. Three boxes gives you 150 chicks. Ross 308 chicks are GH₵20 each from us, so the batch costs GH₵3,000. If you deliver 100 birds at the end, the chick cost alone is about GH₵30 a bird before feed, vaccines or transport.

The spare birds are not wasted. Sell them live to a household or a chop bar, at the live price or below it, so the margin is recovered. Plan that outlet before the chicks arrive, not after. A surplus of birds with no buyer is what turns a good school contract into a loss.

Our starting prices are on our prices page, and the broiler chicks for this kind of plan are on our broiler page. Stocking density matters just as much, because a house that is too full in the last two weeks will not finish the birds the kitchen needs. Our stocking density guide covers how to plan the floor.

Payment cycles: plan the money as if it arrives late

A school or hospital that pays on time is a pleasure. A school that pays when the government releases the money is common, and so is a hospital that pays after the budget committee sits. Plan your cash as if the first payment comes sixty to ninety days after the delivery. That is a planning assumption, not a promise, and it is safer than assuming the cheque will come in the first week.

Put the payment terms in the contract or the purchase order before the first bird is delivered. Write the invoice number, the delivery date and the amount on every slip, so that when the accounts office asks for a reference you can produce it in a minute. A missing reference adds weeks to a payment that was already slow.

Do not finance the next batch from the unpaid invoice. If the school is slow, the birds you have already bought will still need feed. Keep a cash reserve equal to at least one batch of feed and chicks before you say yes to a second institutional order. That reserve is what lets you keep delivering while the first payment is still in the system.

Staggering batches so one order does not empty the house

The trap on a contract farm is putting every bird into the house on the same day because that is simplest to manage. It works until the school order arrives and every bird is ready the same week. Then you have a glut in the house, a feed bill that is growing faster than the income, and nowhere to sell the extra.

Stagger the batches so that each one finishes about a week before the one behind it. Keep the chick orders on a calendar that you can see from the wall. A batch that is due to finish on the day the school wants it is a good batch. A batch that is due three weeks early is a cost you have to carry, and a batch that is due three weeks late is a delivery you have to explain.

• Set the delivery date with the kitchen first, then count backwards eight weeks for the chick date.
• Order the chicks in a box that matches the batch, not a larger one held in reserve. Our delivery page explains how chicks travel to you in ventilated boxes.
• Keep a record of mortality by day, so the count on the delivery slip is one you can defend. For larger staggered programmes, our bulk day-old chicks page covers how orders above 1,000 are quoted.
• Agree in advance what happens to surplus birds, and who buys them.

Where we would start if we were a small farm

If we were a small farm trying to win a school or hospital account, we would start with a day school canteen, not a boarding school. A day school on Fridays has a smaller and more regular order, and it teaches you the delivery discipline you will need for the bigger contract. A missed Friday hurts, but it hurts less than a missed term.

We would ask for the diet sheet or the menu before quoting, and we would ask for the procurement requirements before we wrote a single price. We would take a sample to the kitchen, not a brochure. The same spec-first approach works for restaurants, which our guide to selling chicken to restaurants sets out step by step. And we would keep the first order inside the flock we can fill in a bad month, even if the kitchen asks for more.

Once two terms of deliveries have gone in on time and the invoices have been paid, a larger contract is a real option. Before that, a bigger order is a risk, not a prize. Before you commit to a contract like this, talk it through with us. The WhatsApp line is +233 24 915 1503, and the order form takes a first order.

Checklist before you quote a school or a hospital

• Get the term calendar, feeding days and holiday closures from the kitchen.
• Ask whether the contract is open tender, request for quotes or an approved supplier list.
• Get the diet sheet or menu, and who signs it.
• Confirm the slaughter method and the record the buyer wants.
• Price in the unit the kitchen actually weighs or counts.
• Agree delivery days, times and the cold chain in writing.
• Agree the payment terms, the invoice format and the reference the accounts office needs.
• Hold enough cash to keep the next batch going while the first payment is in the system.

Tick every line before you send the price schedule. Questions about our chicks and orders are answered on our FAQ page. An institution will forgive a slow first quote. It will not forgive a delivery that does not match the paperwork.

Questions farmers ask