The administration of education institutions starting with the 2019-2020 school year will use catering services or will apply the model of school combines. The leasing out of school eateries to specialized business entities that would provide catering services is another solution.
Secretary of state at the Ministry of Education, Culture and Research Angela Kutasevich, in a meeting staged by the National Food Safety Agency on October 25, said the current system of organizing the feeding of students needs to be resuscitated. Many school and kindergarten canteens haven’t been repaired and equipped for many years. Also, the education institutions face an acute shortage of cooks.
Catering implies the preparing of food by specialized private institutions and delivery of food to kindergartens and schools. The model of school combines is now used in the municipality of Chisinau and involves the preparing of food by state-owned public food enterprises and delivery of food to education institutions. According to the secretary of state, these models replace the existing practice when each education institution has a canteen and has to hire personnel. In the current conditions, this is hard.
According to the Agency’s director Gheorghe Gaberi, the state budget allocations for food intended for children are small and one third of these are used inefficiently. “I think that if new methods are used, this money can be used to buy food products of a higher quality,” he stated.
This August, the National Food Safety Agency assessed the preparation of cooking facilities of education institutions for the new school year. The inspectors established that 994 eateries of the almost 1,400 examined didn’t meet the sanitary requirements. In the case of schools, 1,005 cooking facilities of the 1,222 didn’t meet the norms.
