School nutrition programs feed hundreds of thousands of kids per year across the country. (CBC)

Food banks are partnering with an international corporation, to fill the gap left when school nutrition programs close for the summer.

Hundreds of thousands of children take part in school breakfast and lunch programs across the country. But when schools close, it creates a "nutrition gap", said Diane Swinemar, executive director of Feed Nova Scotia.

Their growing bodies rely on the nutrients they get through the school programs.

"They are guaranteed a wonderful healthy lunch that day," she says.

The Sodexo Foundation is the charitable wing of an international food services company. It donates the food and labour to make sandwiches to fill that nutrition gap across the country.

"Last year we made 130,000 sandwiches over the summer," said Tracey Durand, executive director of the Sodexo Foundation in Canada. "Sandwiches, plus healthy snacks and drinks that go with them."

The sandwich-making machinery goes into operation again next week. In Halifax, Swinemar says the need is growing, from 800 lunches a week, delivered last year, to what she projects will be a thousand lunches each week, this summer.