Two educational institutions in the Jonava district prefer to cook their own food for their students and not buy catering services from suppliers. This became clear after conducting a survey of all schools in the district, the municipality reports.
The results of the survey were discussed on Wednesday by a special working group assembled in the district municipality, which considers how to improve the quality of catering services in the district’s educational institutions.
“We surveyed the schools and found out that the Jeronimo Rali Gymnasium and the Swiss Progymnasium would like to feed their pupils, teachers and administration themselves, as is done in Jonava kindergartens. We will talk to the managers of these institutions, we will assess whether the institutions can really provide food.
Perhaps these schools will be able to become “pilots” and will help to assess whether the method of organizing catering, when food is prepared on site by the institution’s own employees, is appropriate and solves the problems of taste, quality, choice, and too high price, which are often mentioned now”, says the chairperson of the working group , deputy mayor Birutė Gailienė.
According to her, all other educational institutions in the district prefer to continue buying catering services from suppliers.
According to B. Gailienė, institutions will have such an opportunity, but they will announce new procurement tenders completely independently. “Now, all the educational institutions in our district are grouped together and buy food services in groups. At the next council meeting, we plan to abandon this grouping, so each institution will announce its purchase”, says B. Gailienė.
Recently, all the procurements of catering services announced by the schools have been won by the Public Enterprise “Bruneros”, which provides the catering service to Jonava schools. Smaller procurements are expected to involve more suppliers, possibly including local caterers.
The district municipality regularly receives various complaints about the quality of meals in schools. During inspections, it is found that educational institutions are faced with the supply of low-quality fruit, lack of variety in menus, lack of kitchen and service staff, turnover and poor hygiene.
Three schools in the Jonava district have already concluded new contracts with the current supplier, while the service contracts of the others will expire this year.
