Indonesia shuts 1,999 free-meal kitchens that never registered for sanitation checks

Indonesia's National Nutrition Agency on Monday suspended 1,999 of the 27,022 kitchens that cook for President Prabowo Subianto's free-meal programme. The kitchens had not registered with the health ministry for mandatory hygiene and sanitation certification, agency chief Sudaryono said.

The hygiene and sanitation certification is a mandatory requirement for operating kitchens that provide the free meals programme, he said. The agency will investigate the 1,999 sites before deciding what happens next. Compliance, he added, is not optional if the food is going to children and other recipients.

The numbers around the programme are large enough to make a 7 percent kitchen closure a national event. The free nutritious meal scheme, known as MBG, launched in January 2025. It is one of Prabowo's signature social projects. It has also been a running public-health problem. Charles Honoris, a lawmaker who oversees the file, said at least 50,000 people had been affected by food poisoning from the meals by 1 September, citing health department data. Last week alone more than 2,000 students and teachers in several provinces fell ill after eating the food. The agency has blamed improper storage and late delivery for most of those cases.

Leadership of the agency has already changed once this year under criminal pressure. In early June the Attorney General's Office detained then-head Dadan Hindayana and two deputies on corruption allegations. A moratorium on new kitchens followed. The budget attached to the programme was cut from Rp335 trillion to Rp268 trillion. The current suspension is a different tool. It does not freeze construction. It shuts kitchens that are already cooking but have not filed for the sanitation certificate the health ministry requires.

Sudaryono goes by one name, which is common in Indonesia and should not be read as incomplete identification. He said the remaining 25,000-plus kitchens continue to operate. That claim will be tested in the districts where a suspended kitchen was the only site serving a cluster of schools. The agency has not published a province-by-province list. Without that list, parents know only that nearly 2,000 kitchens are dark and that 50,000 poisoning cases were already on the books before the suspension.

Food-safety failures in a mass feeding programme have a simple mechanics. Meals cooked in the morning and delivered after midday in tropical heat spoil if cold-chain and holding times are ignored. Certification does not by itself fix a late truck. It does create a paper trail that lets an inspector close a site before the next outbreak rather than after it. The fact that 1,999 kitchens had not even registered for that inspection is the detail that should worry the health ministry more than the raw count of closed sites.

Prabowo's government has promised to treat the poisoning cases seriously. That phrase has been used after each cluster this year. What is new on 8 September is a number: almost 2,000 kitchens, about one in fourteen of the national network, stood outside the certification system. The investigation Sudaryono announced will have to answer whether those kitchens were feeding children anyway, and for how long.

For a programme this size the operational choice is ugly either way. Leave uncertified kitchens open and the next poisoning cluster is a matter of time. Close them and some schools lose the meal that the president promised. The agency chose closure first and investigation second. That is the correct order for a sanitation rule. It is also a public admission that a flagship welfare project was running thousands of kitchens the health ministry could not see.

Local governments will now have to say how they will feed the children whose kitchen is on the suspended list. Some districts can reroute meals from a certified site an hour away. Others cannot. If those districts go silent for a week, the 1,999 figure will show up not as a hygiene victory but as empty plates. That is the next number to ask for: how many schools lost a meal on the first day the kitchens went dark.