The Minister of Health, Manuela García, explained this Wednesday in Parliament, in response to the PSIB deputy, Patrícia Gómez, an incident related to a food allergy in a school canteen at Can Arabí in the Terreno neighborhood, in Palma. It was in 2025, when a monitor confused a lactose-free yogurt with a product suitable for children allergic to cow's milk protein and gave it to a student with this allergy, who suffered anaphylaxis, that is, a severe allergic reaction. According to what García related, the child's menu was prepared and packaged individually, but did not include dessert. That day, four lactose-free menus had arrived intended for four other special menus and the monitor thought that one of the yogurts that accompanied them was suitable for this student. The minister has attributed the event to "human error".

The Can Arabí central kitchen, located in Binissalem, will remain closed until at least June 2027. This was announced this Wednesday by the Minister of Health, Manuela García, during her appearance before the Health Commission of the Parliament, in which she justified the extension of the precautionary suspension of activity due to repeated deficiencies detected in the facilities. As she explained, the company has accumulated ten complaints since 2021 and eight sanctioning proceedings.

The fall of Can Arabí has reshuffled the map of school canteens in the Balearic Islands. The company that managed 44 of them last academic year and led the ranking of centers has disappeared from the new list of the Department of Education and its business has been distributed among several companies. But the change has not meant an atomization of the service. On the contrary: a significant part of the canteens that have become available has gone to operators that already managed dozens of centers, reinforcing the weight of the large operators.

Can Arabí tried to return to the Balearic Islands' public school canteens this school year, only three months after Health authorities had provisionally closed its central kitchen due to various health violations. As ARA Balears has learned, the company presented itself in the new contracting procedures under a different name and with a responsible declaration in which it claimed to meet the conditions required by the Department of Education to manage the canteens. An anonymous call alerted the department that behind this new bid was Can Arabí. Education verified the link and excluded it from the procedure.

Can Arabí will not manage any public school canteen this academic year. The company, which provided service to 44 centers until last year, has been left out of the new contracts that the Ministry of Education is awarding these days. The outcome comes after the Ministry of Health provisionally suspended the activity of the Can Arabí central kitchen last June due to several breaches in food safety matters. Education confirms that the suspension from Health has been decisive in removing the company from the new contracts. “Health suspended Can Arabí as an operator at the time. This allowed Education to restrict all contracts,” explain sources from the department. According to Education, the new services are being awarded to other companies these days and “none of them is Can Arabí”.

The Balearic education system concentrates school cafeterias in the hands of a small number of companies, a reality that highlights the inequality in service management and hinders the survival of family-run businesses and independent kitchens. According to recent data from the Ministry of Education, 212 public schools have cafeteria services, which depend primarily on external managers. Three companies—Restaurante Can Arabí, Catering S'Olivera, and Comensales Comedores Escolares—manage 107 schools, more than half the total. Other companies such as Julio Tundidor Molina, Diver Migjorn, and Menudixm also manage several cafeterias, while small businesses have a very small and declining presence, at a time when the prices of food products and raw materials, as well as general costs, are rising, making it extremely difficult to compete with large companies for contracts, as they complain. Only eight companies or self-employed cooks manage a single cafeteria each, highlighting the sector's imbalance. On the other hand, the case of Catering S'Olivera is particularly illustrative of the oligopoly in school food services: it controls 32 of the 38 school cafeterias in Ibiza, that is, 84.2% of the total.