Checking the ticket at the fruit shop, passing through the oil area and seeing that the white label extra virgin olive oil is already around 10 euros, or leaving the fishmonger with your wallet shaking can raise many questions. One of them should be how the general increase in food prices is affecting school cafeterias and what the companies in charge of managing them do so that the accounts are settled taking into account that the price of the menus is fixed. Is all this affecting the quantity or quality of what our children eat?
A few weeks ago, the photograph shared by a mother on X (Twitter) with her children's dining room tray set off alarm bells. What was seen did not look very good, but, above all, the apparently meager ration that was being served was striking. Beyond the name of the company that was guessed in the image, there was no specific data on the age of the students, nor the school, but there was the price: 9.4 euros per day.
A really high figure because, with variations in each Community and without entering into scholarships, aid or variable rates depending on income or number of children, Catalonia is the area with the highest menu price in the country and in this last year the maximum set is of 6.91 euros per day. The country's average is around 5 euros.
Furthermore, it must be taken into account that this is the maximum set by law, so companies that choose to provide the service can offer it for less. It is also important to remember that this amount also includes the cost of the monitors who take care of the dining room. We always talk, yes, about public centers.
But it was not so much the price as the quantity of food that was seen on that tray that was surprising. Since the maximum price is set by regulations, are rations being reduced? Does what is known as redflation also exist in school cafeterias: same price, but less quantity?
“We take the Health Department's grammage table as a reference, increasing the recommended portions by 20% on average,” explains David Caballé, head of Ecoarrels, a small company that takes care of the canteens of some schools in Barcelona and Maresme.
Almost 60% of the sector is shared by four large companies. One of them is Ausolan, a veteran Basque company specialized in community catering and that manages school canteens throughout the country.
“The Ausolan nutritional policy is governed based on the requirements and guidelines set by the official organizations and the corresponding reference entities and that determine the nutritional composition of the menus, as well as the quantity, frequency and qualities of the raw materials necessary for their composition,” they point out.
Feeding children well in schools should be a matter of state, but reality indicates that, above all, it is a complex issue. To the regulations of each Community are added the management models (the AFA, the school itself, the education consortium can be in charge), and also the facilities, because there are many centers that no longer have a kitchen and are totally dependent on external services.
The number of variables complicates any attempt at a general X-ray of the country's dining rooms. The OCU published theirs last fall focusing on quality and the results were not particularly good: of 622 menus analyzed, not one met all the recommendations of AESAN (Spanish Agency for Food Safety and Nutrition), they pointed out.
Food Service Spain, the association that brings together the main companies in the sector, came out against that report, ensuring that the sample represented a tiny percentage (less than 3%) of the country's menus, questioned its validity and claimed the criteria of quality shared by its members.
But, returning to the price of the menus, this same entity explained in May 2023 its position regarding the controversial increase of more than 12% in the price of school canteens in the Community of Madrid, recalling that they had been frozen for nine years and pointing out the increase in costs they had experienced during that time.
"In the last year, there has been a variation in the food index whereby basic products on the daily menu such as eggs, oil, dairy products, or potatoes have raised their prices between 60% and 80%," they point out from Ausolan. . Something to which we must add the energy bill, with an obvious impact on production and also on the logistics necessary for the distribution, whether of the ingredients or the dishes prepared in central kitchens.
Obviously, the price of the menu is set for the school year at the beginning of the school year and the increase in prices cannot be affected. Despite this, the promise is clear: not to affect the quality of what is served in the dining rooms. “Companies assume the added costs. But we have been providing healthy, safe, healthy, varied and nutritionally balanced menus for more than 50 years,” defend the Ausolan spokespersons.
From Ecoarrels and XAMEC (Agroecological Network of School Canteens) paint a somewhat different situation and do not hesitate to point out what happens in some schools where companies are chosen solely to offer a more competitive price.
Management, they denounce, is governed mainly by public tenders, but then there is a lack of resources to control and audit the winning bid during the period that the bidding lasts. “We have all seen news about companies that won the contest for all the schools in a town and that the rations were ridiculous,” says David Caballé in reference to the aforementioned controversy.
From Ecoarrels they put specific figures to the price increases: “5% in planned foods, 82% in EVOO, 23% in logistics, plus the corresponding increases in the agreements.” Only 5% food? The key - explains Caballé - is in Ecocentral, the only purchasing center in the country specialized in the supply of organic products, both fresh, such as fruits and vegetables, and dried, such as pasta, cereals and legumes.
“This unique model involves the union between managers and farmers, who annually agree on prices and plan crops meticulously for the next year,” he details. The majority of farmers have made an effort to adapt to the reality of the canteens, and except in cases such as EVOO, a certain price stability has been maintained in the foods used.
Another aspect is added to the complexity of the system: scholarships and the delay in their payment by the administration. Something that is mainly reported by small businesses, for whom the usual delay of between three months and half a year in collection by the administration can mean having to close.
A situation that, Caballé recalls, ends up generating class inequality. "With this reality you do not consider being able to offer a quality project like ours to neighborhoods with a difficult economic reality, where in a school there may be more than 90% of scholarship users."
Have the rations been reduced then as that photograph reported? In the specific case it seems obvious, but it is practically impossible to give a concrete answer. Companies, large or small, deny it with more precise data or more general reflections, but ensuring that the advice of official organizations is always followed and that everything is monitored by a team of nutritionists.
From there, the situation in each school may be different. Although it is not counted as a reliable statistic, in radio-park, always a good information system of what happens in the schools in the area (Eixample, Barcelona), there have been no complaints in this regard from parents. And in our school the portions are maintained and the option of repeating the first course many days is still there.
