Gutessen Consulting

Gutessen Consulting (GEC) is a small enterprise, which has been founded by biologist Karin Kaiblinger and nutritionist Rosemarie Zehetgruber in 2005. GEC offers nutrition-related advisory services and trainings, focus of GEC is on healthy and sustainable food for schools, kindergartens, communities and enterprises. GEC counsels communal carriers, kitchen teams, inn-keepers as well as organic farms. GEC offers training and qualification enhancement for cooks, farmers, teachers and other stakeholders. This is also supported by the publication of digital educational and analogue educational and training materials like guidelines, e-learning-courses, brochures and other publications.

GEC specially designs and implements training courses for pedagogues, pupils and multipliers. Topics of the trainings are the development of pedagogical concepts, didactical materials as well as organisational, technical and vocational skills. Topics of the e-learning-courses for teachers/pupils are e.g. “food and sustainability, “doing gender in school food/drinking or “guidance throw the maze of different logos on food stuff. We also developed e-learning courses for kitchen staff (topics are e.g. “cultural diversity/intercultural cooking”, “vegan/vegetarian food”, “seasonal & local food”, “free from – clean food”). In the sparkling science project “McKioto”, we created participatory videos with pupils and teachers of different schools. Participatory videos involve a range of video production and screening activities, which drive an evolving process of exploration and dialogue on shared issues.

The focus of contents in our training and courses are healthy and sustainable high quality food, food culture, the sustainable use of resources. Each year GEC carries out seminars and workshops with about 2.000 teachers, elementary pedagogues and farmers on healthy and sustainable food and drinking for kindergartens, schools and communities. GEC is a training partner in educational colleges in several federal states of Austria. Beside consultations and trainings GEC does publications, investigations, and performs pilot projects. E.g. GEC has run the 3 years lasting pilot project “EU-school fruit scheme in Vienna” – since February 2015 the scheme has been implemented in all Viennese schools.

A running project of GEC in Viennese schools is the project “drinking tap water in school”. The project shows the lack of knowledge in headmasters, pedagogues, authorities, as well as the high interest in possibilities to get active. The project is highly successful - about 75% of all primary schools and about 50% of all junior highs with about 70.000 pupils age 6 to 15 years and about 7.000 teachers became a “waterschool”. Pupils only drink tap water at school, pedagogues remind them to drink enough.