IPB Student Body Rejects Campus Management of Free Nutritious Meals Kitchen

IPB University Student Body President Abdan Rofi, representing student aspirations at the campus, has rejected the university managing the free nutritious meals (MBG) kitchen. Abdan stated that the campus is not the place to manage food.

He also rejected equating the campus budget for managing the MBG kitchen with a living laboratory for research and innovation development. “Educational institutions as moral and intellectual bodies are not for sacrificial projects. Please, sir, do not force it too much,” he said when contacted on Wednesday, 6 May 2026.

IPB is one of the campuses involved in managing the MBG kitchen or nutritional fulfilment service unit (SPPG). Abdan conveyed that with the rejection from IPB students, they will soon submit this aspiration to the rectorate. “We will escalate it together with the IPB-wide BEM alliance to be conveyed to the rectorate,” he said.

Tempo has attempted to seek a response from IPB regarding the BEM IPB statement. However, until this news was written, the campus has not provided a response. The IPB public relations team stated that they will first communicate this information to the campus directorate.

Separately, in a written statement, IPB Rector Alim Setiawan Slamet once addressed the management of the MBG kitchen at IPB. According to Alim, the campus’s involvement in building the SPPG for the MBG programme has a strategic rationale as it positions the campus as a knowledge-based solution provider.

This programme, according to Alim, targets fundamental issues such as nutrition, education, and human resource quality. Therefore, he said, it needs to be implemented science-based. “The campus ensures that design, implementation, to evaluation is carried out in a measured and data-based manner,” he said.

He also claimed that with the campus managing the kitchen programme, the MBG programme can integrate the food system as an ecosystem from upstream to downstream, starting from production, processing, to consumption and nutrition. “The SPPG can become a node that connects that chain efficiently, so MBG develops from merely a meals programme into a food system innovation model,” said Alim.