@CatherineFlick Also, look at the dates. The latest possible period an annual financial report issued in Nov 2023 could cover starts in Nov 2022. The previous year (the one we compare against to get a 30% rise) must have started in Nov 2021 or earlier. COVID restrictions in England ended in April 2022. I'm not exactly gobsmacked that a catering firm is more profitable in the first full financial year without COVID restrictions.
@Abelian schools and such were back before then! Though I’ll agree it probably wasn’t back to full steam.
@CatherineFlick Oh, absolutely. But UK schools are a tiny part of what the company does. We're all looking at that headline 30% figure, which relates to all sorts of activity, 2/3 of it in N America, and drawing dire conclusions about UK school meals. Global profits went sharply down in 2020/21 (hurrah!) and came back up again in 2022/23 (boo!). The figures for Le Manoir probably look fairly similar, so I'm not convinced that that in itself tells us very much about the quality of school meals.