The press is mistakenly and misleadingly mixing public catering with the overpricing of the Operational Programme for Supporting Persons in Need

Anna Zoltai, President of KÖZSZÖV

An article published on a domestic news portal incorrectly and inexplicably focused on the public catering sector, citing the Integrity Authority’s announcement of October 4, 2024. According to the article, the investigation of the Operational Program for Supporting People in Need (RSZTOP) found overpricing. While we strongly condemn such abuses, KÖZSZÖV draws attention to the fact that RSZTOP is not the same as public catering, and such a mistake is extremely harmful to the Hungarian public catering sector!

Hungarian public catering primarily provides services within the framework of institutional and workplace care, as opposed to the operational program that provides needy families with food packages under RISZTOP.
Several tens of thousands of employees of public catering service providers provide their consumers with millions of meals daily and continuously, in nurseries, kindergartens, schools, residential institutions and workplaces. In their case, the possibility of abuse cited in the article is excluded, since they finance their purchases as private companies, municipal, institutional and workplace-maintained canteens, in market-based settlements, and cannot be associated with any state sector.