Indonesia's free school meals program runs on spreadsheets

If you live in Indonesia, you’ve heard of Makan Bergizi Gratis — MBG. It’s the national free school meals program that rolled out at scale in 2025. Most international coverage frames MBG as a political headline. The operational reality is a different story.

What MBG actually is

MBG provides free, nutritionally compliant meals to every Indonesian school child — primary through senior high school. The program isn’t run from a central kitchen. It’s distributed across tens of thousands of local units called SPPG (Satuan Pelayanan Pemenuhan Gizi). Each SPPG covers a service area, cooks the meals, packages them, distributes them to partner schools, and reports the results upward.

A typical SPPG kitchen serves several thousand meals per day, every school day, across roughly a dozen partner schools. Multiply that by the active SPPG count nationally and the scale is clear: millions of meals a day, hundreds of millions of meals a year.

The kitchens are the program. The kitchens are also the bottleneck.

What they’re using

The tooling — across most of the SPPG kitchens whose operations have been documented publicly — comes down to:

• Spreadsheets for menu planning, recipe nutrition, daily portion counts, inventory tracking.
• WhatsApp groups for coordination between Kepala SPPG (kitchen lead), cook, drivers, and school contacts.
• Paper logs for sample retention (which dishes were held back, when, by whom), holding-time checkpoints, and distribution sign-off at each partner school.
• Printed forms for monthly BGN reports — Badan Gizi Nasional, the national nutrition body that oversees the program.

This isn’t a critique of the operators. It’s a description of the tools available at their price point. Spreadsheets work because every laptop ships with Excel or Google Sheets. WhatsApp works because every phone has it. Paper works because pens are cheap.

The program has obligations that spreadsheets and paper struggle to meet at scale.

The compliance surface

MBG isn’t “cook food, hand to school.” The technical guidance — Juknis MBG 2026 — pins down a long list of rules every kitchen has to follow:

• Sample retention. A portion of every batch must be sealed and held for a defined number of hours after distribution, in case of foodborne incident investigation.
• Holding time. Cooked food can only sit in a hot-box for a defined maximum before it must be distributed or discarded.
• Hot-box temperature. Minimum core temperature on arrival at the partner school.
• AKG percentage. Each daily menu must hit a minimum Angka Kecukupan Gizi for the relevant age group.
• Protein variety. Over a defined period, the kitchen must cycle through a minimum number of distinct protein sources.
• UMKM purchase ratio. A minimum percentage of ingredient sourcing must come from local small businesses.
• Cashless transactions. A minimum percentage of payment to suppliers must be electronic.
• Incident SLA. Foodborne or operational incidents above a severity threshold must be reported to BGN within a defined window.
• Traceability. From a suspect meal, the kitchen must be able to trace back to the supplier batch in under a defined number of seconds during incident review.

A spreadsheet can hold some of this. None of them can compute it in real time, drive the UI consequences of it, or block an unsafe distribution at the threshold.

What that costs the operator

The Kepala SPPG — the person running the kitchen — typically has zero IT support. They’re a nutrition or culinary specialist, sometimes with a teaching background. They’re not in this role to maintain a spreadsheet system. They end up doing it anyway because nobody built the tool for them.

The cost shows up in a few places:

1. Compliance drift. A spreadsheet doesn’t refuse to let you distribute past holding time. A paper log doesn’t change colour when the sample retention countdown is in the red. Compliance becomes a thing the operator has to remember instead of a thing the system enforces.
2. Monthly report assembly. BGN reports get assembled by hand at month-end from spreadsheets and paper logs. The data is correct, eventually. The week of compiling it is friction that competes with cooking.
3. Audit response time. When BGN or a partner school calls about a specific meal on a specific day, the operator pulls paper logs from a binder. Traceability becomes a fire drill.

This isn’t anyone’s fault. The tools available at the price point of “a kitchen’s IT budget” don’t yet cover this category of work.

What the path looks like

The right tool here isn’t a SaaS dashboard. The right tool is a piece of software the kitchen lead can install on the same laptop they already have, run offline (because the kitchen’s internet is unreliable), and use to track the entire operational day — menu, recipes, inventory, production, distribution, sample bank, incidents, photos, monthly reports.

That’s what I’ve been building. The project is called MBG Dashboard. It’s open source under MIT, written for a single user (the Kepala SPPG), targets both desktop and web from the same codebase, and treats the Juknis MBG 2026 thresholds as first-class UI consequences rather than settings buried three menus deep.

A case study lives at /work/mbg-dashboard if you want the longer read.

Tooling won’t fix Indonesian gov-tech on its own. But operational programs at national scale deserve operational tools that match their reality. MBG is a meaningful program. The kitchens running it deserve better than another Excel template.