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.