While the program has been able to reach millions of beneficiaries nationwide, it has also faced several setbacks.
The recent mass food poisoning linked to the ambitious program in Sidoarjo, East Java, has unraveled the issue of a centralized kitchen pushed beyond its capacity.
In early September 2026, hundreds of students at the Manba'ul Hikam Islamic Boarding School in Tanggulangin, Sidoarjo, fell ill after consuming MBG dishes supplied by the Kalitengah Nutrition Fulfillment Service Unit (SPPG).
By September 3, Sidoarjo District Health Office data showed that the number of victims had swelled to 730 people. The affected victims were spread across 19 schools around Tanggulangin and required treatment at eight hospitals.
Chronologically, it was revealed that the meals had passed their safe consumption window. Staff at the SPPG or MBG kitchen started preparing the ingredients at midnight and finished cooking by 5:00 a.m. However, the meal boxes were only distributed after 11:00 a.m. and consumed by the students between late morning and early afternoon.
Head of the National Nutrition Agency (BGN), Sudaryono, described the incident as negligence rather than a mere technical accident, arguing that such delivery delays should have been prevented through strict adherence to kitchen schedules.
Beyond distribution issues, the deeper root cause lies in the mismatch between the kitchen’s capacity and its assigned production volume.
The Kalitengah SPPG was tasked with supplying around 2,800 portions daily for 19 schools, including roughly 1,000 portions for Islamic boarding schools. This heavy workload forced the small-scale kitchen to start cooking in the early hours, store the prepared meals for several hours, and deliver them in stages to the scattered schools.
BGN findings show that around 80 percent to 90 percent of MBG-linked food poisoning cases were related to failure in complying with the standard operating procedures (SOPs), including for the consumption time, storage, raw material receiving, and food temperature control.
In response to the food poisoning incident, BGN has taken a firm step by suspending Kalitengah SPPG and evaluating 174 SPPGs.
The agency has also split SPPG operations into two shifts: a production and distribution shift running from early morning through the morning, and an evaluation shift in the afternoon to inspect raw material receiving and record leftover food.
Additionally, all food containers must now carry an information label, monitoring is conducted online, and staff evaluations take place daily at 5:00 p.m., with strict sanctions ranging from warning letters to termination for negligent personnel.
While response measures have been taken swiftly, broader data suggests that the issue is structural, rather than mere individual negligence in a single kitchen.
Consequently, Deputy Chair of Commission X of the House of Representatives Lalu Hadrian Irfani urged a comprehensive evaluation of SPPG governance, moving beyond procedural fixes at the involved site.
Despite the enhancement of SOPs, the mismatch between kitchen capacity and production volume will remain a fundamental issue as long as the MBG program relies on a centralized kitchen model. This has brought the idea of kitchen decentralization to the forefront of policy discussions.
Before the incident in Sidoarjo, Lalu once proposed the school-run kitchen concept, which allows eligible schools to independently manage their own meal preparation, provided they pass a feasibility assessment by BGN. This move is in line with the spirit of educational decentralization, given that schools and local authorities understand ground conditions far better than a centralized kitchen serving thousands of meals across multiple sub-districts.
An economist from the Center of Reform on Economics (CORE) Indonesia, Eliza, offers a more detailed mapping of how a decentralization approach could be implemented.
She identified four small-scale kitchen models that could partially take over the role of centralized hubs: micro, small, and medium enterprise (MSME) kitchens producing around 300 portions daily, school kitchens, market trader cooperative kitchens, and social institution kitchens.
Her main argument is simple yet fundamental. Small-scale kitchens do not need to produce thousands of meals at once. As a result, when a failure occurs at a single production point, it will not cause a systemic impact across dozens of schools, as happened in Tanggulangin.
Japan’s kyushoku system and South Korea’s school lunch model are frequently cited as benchmarks. However, adopting school-based kitchens with restaurant-grade quality and hygiene standards, similar to those in both countries, is not a quick fix in the near term.
A study comparing the kyushoku school lunch model and MBG revealed that there are at least four structural hurdles in Indonesia: limited budgets and infrastructure, uneven food distribution, reliance on local ingredients with non-standardized nutritional quality, and regional dietary variations that make it difficult to standardize under a single sterile and self-sufficient school kitchen system.
As a result, adopting this model outright is not a realistic short-term fix, but rather a long-term goal requiring years of infrastructure development.
Lessons from private schools
Nevertheless, a simpler form of this decentralization has already been adopted organically in several private schools, long before the term 'school kitchen' surfaced in policy discussions.
Semut-Semut The Natural School, a private elementary school in Depok, West Java, has been running an independent kitchen system without needing a setup as complex as those in Japan or South Korea. The school offers an optional lunch program for students, which also provides meals to teachers and staff.
Lunch is provided in partnership with a local small food vendor located directly across from the school campus. Even so, the school strictly supervises the food safety aspect, from menu planning to the hygiene of eating utensils.
While the scale is certainly much smaller than the Islamic boarding school complex and the 19 schools in Tanggulangin, the core principle aligns with the proposed reforms for the MBG program: a short distribution chain, kitchens located close to beneficiaries, and direct oversight by relevant parties.
If this model is adopted for the nationwide MBG implementation, strict oversight remains a non-negotiable requirement. Official certification and eligibility standards from the BGN must serve as a mandatory prerequisite before schools or MSMEs are permitted to run independent kitchens, supported by mentoring mechanisms and funding schemes from the central and regional budgets.
Without strong institutionalization, kitchen decentralization for the MBG program risks merely shifting the point of failure from a single overloaded centralized kitchen to hundreds of small kitchens with weak standards.
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Translator: Aditya Ramadhan, Raka Adji
Editor: Azis Kurmala
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