Santo Domingo.- The Dominican State allocated more than RD$1,152 million pesos in food services for public employees between January 2024 and April 2026, according to an analysis based on public procurement processes.
This is about hundreds of contracts related to breakfasts, lunches, and dinners of a recurring nature, that is, the ordinary expenditure on food within the institutions.
In daily terms, this is equivalent to approximately RD$1.3 million pesos per day.
The expenditure is not distributed evenly. The Ministry of Interior and Police tops the list with more than RD$144 million, followed by the General Comptroller’s Office of the Republic and the Ministry of Finance, both with amounts exceeding RD$80 million.
Also listed are the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Mipymes, the Dominican Institute of Civil Aviation and the National Office of Industrial Property, with figures exceeding RD$70 million. Further down appears PROMESE/CAL, with more than RD$67 million in this type of contracting.
This expense occurs in a context where the State itself has mechanisms to provide food, State Economic Dining Halls, where a ration has been offered to the public at a low cost, around RD$10 pesos, through a scheme subsidized by the State.
This service has also been used by public institutions through agreements to provide lunches to their employees. There are documented cases in entities such as National Assets, the State Sugar Council and the IDOPPRIL, where employees receive food through this mechanism.
Despite the existence of this system, the analysis shows that multiple institutions continue to recurrently contract food services with private providers.
