Indonesia set out to give free nutritious meals to almost every schoolchild in the country.

Instead, President Prabowo Subianto’s flagship programme has been shaken by food-poisoning outbreaks, corruption allegations, budget reductions and a court ruling limiting how it can be funded.

The Free Nutritious Meals programme began in January 2025 with a broad social purpose: reduce malnutrition and stunting, support pregnant women and improve children’s readiness to learn.

The intended scale was enormous.

By the end of 2026, the government had hoped to reach about 83 million recipients, including pupils and expectant mothers, or close to a third of Indonesia’s population.

The ambition created a logistical challenge on a national scale.

Indonesia is an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, with large differences in transport, sanitation, kitchen capacity and local government capability.

Delivering safe food every school day requires reliable suppliers, refrigeration, trained staff, clean water, testing and clear accountability.

The programme expanded faster than many of those safeguards could be put in place.

Food safety became the clearest warning sign.

Research assessing the first year of the programme linked 177 food-poisoning outbreaks to school meals by the end of 2025, affecting more than 20,000 children across 33 provinces.

Reported symptoms included nausea, stomach pain and vomiting, while laboratory investigations in some cases identified bacteria including E. coli, Salmonella and Staphylococcus.

The problem was not simply one bad meal or one kitchen.

Public-health researchers found major weaknesses in the operating system: too few kitchens had hygiene certification, cooked food was sometimes left at room temperature for seven or eight hours before being eaten, and many facilities lacked cold storage, sterilisation equipment and effective health monitoring.

Local health offices were often not fully integrated into detecting and responding to outbreaks.

The programme’s governing structure has also come under criminal scrutiny.

In June, investigators arrested the former head of the National Nutrition Agency, Dadan Hindayana, and two other senior officials on corruption allegations connected to the approval of foundations involved in meal distribution.

The allegations have not been proven in court, but the arrests intensified concerns that a programme designed for public nutrition had become vulnerable to politically connected contractors and weak controls.

The government has responded by reducing the programme’s reach and budget, suspending or closing kitchens that fail operational standards and pausing distribution during school holidays.

The 2026 allocation was initially set at 335 trillion rupiah, then reduced to 268 trillion rupiah and later to about 229 trillion rupiah, or roughly $16.5 billion.

Officials have said the emphasis must shift from rapid expansion to food quality and safety.

The retrenchment carries its own political and social cost.

Before the latest review, the programme said it had reached more than 62 million people.

Reducing the number of recipients may ease pressure on kitchens and public finances, but it also means fewer children and families receive a benefit that was presented as a national priority.

A constitutional court ruling has created another constraint.

The court said the government cannot use the education budget to finance the meal scheme beyond the permitted transition period, arguing that constitutionally protected education spending must remain available for teachers, schools, scholarships and core learning needs.

That ruling does not end the programme, but it forces the government to find a more sustainable funding structure.

The central failure was not the idea of feeding children at school.

School-meal programmes can improve nutrition, attendance and household finances when they are properly designed.

Indonesia’s experience shows the risk of treating a public-health system as a political rollout: scale can be announced quickly, but safe kitchens, independent inspection, transparent procurement and local capacity take longer to build.

The government is now trying to preserve the programme by making it smaller, safer and more tightly controlled.

Its next test is whether it can rebuild trust among parents and schools while proving that a meal intended to improve a child’s health will not put that child at risk.