Food service market dominated by a handful of companies – public procurement watchdog

A handful of food service companies regularly snatch government contracts, an investigation by Lithuania’s public procurement watchdog has found.

The Public Procurement Office, responsible for inspecting how government institutions buy goods and services from private-sector providers, recently inspected food service provision in several foster homes.

Diana Vilytė, director of the Public Procurement Office, says that conditions in the calls for tenders are set to high, which prevents many smaller suppliers from competing for contracts.

As a result, several big companies win over half of all food and catering supply contracts, leaving little for several hundred smaller competitors who share the rest of the market.