Up to 42 public daycare centers in Barcelona and their families are living these days with great anguish and concern about what their children will eat. The company in charge of the food service, called Comer bien, has entered bankruptcy and does not guarantee the supply of food in the coming days. That is to say, next week the children will not eat well or badly, they simply will not have food. There are schools that assure that they have food to make meals until the end of this week, but they no longer have food for next week. The Barcelona City Council has assured this medium that it is working to solve the problem and has authorized the centers’ management to buy the necessary food with the daycare’s money. An emergency meeting is scheduled for this Wednesday to try to get the other concessionaire companies to take over the canteen service of the affected schools.

“There are schools, like ours, that this Friday will no longer have food for the children,” says Astrid Batalla, president of the AFA of the Bressol Municipal Xiroi School, located in the district of Les Corts. This Tuesday, the director of the center announced that the company in charge of the cafeteria of this center and of 41 more of the 105 public schools in the city had entered bankruptcy proceedings, that the cooks were not paid and neither were the suppliers, which is why they were stopping supplying food. Batalla assures that today there are centers that no longer have bread or milk and that the Institut Municipal d’Educació de Barcelona (EIMB) is asking the management of the affected centers to buy the necessary food using the school’s money. .

The City Council has explained to this medium that Comer Bien has informed them that they have “difficulties” in continuing to provide the service under the conditions required by the contract. It has also confirmed that the management of these centers are “exceptionally authorized to use economic resources of autonomous management” if it is necessary to “supply” food products to the schools “while the problem is resolved.” There are several meetings planned for this Wednesday.

The affected company manages four lots of daycare centers that affect 42 centers and the IMEB has initiated the necessary actions to “solve the problem” while the affected AFAs are also mobilizing through a WhatsApp group.

While this is happening, families are experiencing the situation with anxiety because they do not know with certainty what their children will eat starting next week. Batalla, who has a two-year-old son at the center, regrets that it is now, that the situation is so critical, that the City Council is trying to solve the situation even though they knew that delays in payroll payments had begun in November. to the cooks. The workers have been doing “magic” for days to be able to serve the agreed upon menus. And these workers are angry and sad: they don’t get paid and they don’t have food to cook.

At the EBM Can Novell in Les Corts, the two kitchen workers began to have problems with the payment of payroll in September and the EIMB was notified then, but the delays in payments have continued, says Maria Ninot, member of the AFA. and mother of a two-year-old child. And they have not yet been paid for the month of January, this mother denounces that she trusts that the food problem will end up being solved and that she is more concerned about the situation of the workers.

In this daycare they still have milk, yogurt, legumes or pasta. They don’t know if they will have food next week. The problem, says Astrid Batalla, is that they are not allowed to deal with this setback by making the families themselves food for their children and taking it in a container to the center because the allergen regulations do not allow it. Even so, in Xicoi they do not rule out agreeing and cooking the planned dishes at home if the problem is not solved next week. “Our children go to daycare because we work and we cannot go to pick them up at mealtime.” the Mint.

Both mothers trust in the good will of the centers to solve a problem that many families were unaware of.