BSR Stakeholders' workshop on Sustainable Public Meals Resilience to Crises

Over 40 stakeholders and experts from 8 BSR countries gathered on 19th of April at Riga 13. secondary school to jointly discuss crises preparedness of public catering services.

The detailed examples ranged from crises management plans at the institutional level up to the national level, or no in-advance plans at all. Among the presented examples were COVID-19 related school closures as well as high waves of immigrants from Ukraine requiring public support.

The presentations were provided by:

Espoo Catering Oy (FI), Länsstyrelsen Stockholm (SE), Rybnik Municipality (PL), City of Warsaw (PL), Baltic Restaurants Estonia (EE), Riga City Council (LV) and agrathaer (DE).

After learning from the detailed cases, the participants enjoyed lunch at the school canteen. Therefore, no other field trip was needed to learn about and taste the public meals in Latvia.

During the rest of the workshop, the participants were divided into four groups and a vivid discussion on per-selected crises took place:

1. Disturbance in supply chain – e.g. ordered goods out of stock, organic standards are not fulfilled


2. Staff related issues – e.g. shortage of employees


3. Resources efficiency oriented issues – e.g. increase of the electricity costs or a electricity cut off, food waste


4. Changes in the production structure – e.g. sudden and complete closure of neighbour kitchen unit

The work for the Crises Management Support Package will continue based on excellent input received during the workshop.