China View: Behind The Curtain, The Frozen Shrimp Scandal, the Bidding Trap, And The Nitrite Poisoning Case In Elementary School Cafeterias.
In September 2025, a primary school cafeteria in Shanghai, China, investigated insects in the packaging of frozen shrimp. The source of the ingredients pointed to the catering supplier Shanghai Green Express Foods Company (SGEFC). Official reports from China stated that SGEFC found insect bodies in the shrimp, while this company officials publicly claimed that the school cafeteria's shrimp packaging contained shrimp guts and sand, about the need for stricter regulations and oversight in the procurement of food for school lunches. In China, the education system mandates 9 years of compulsory schooling, and the school cafeteria primarily provides school lunches for Chinese students. This controversy led to investigations into the practices of other catering suppliers in school cafeterias across China.
SGEFC secured the cafeteria bid on the day of the case filing. This juxtaposition of serious criminal suspicions alongside a successful business bid has raised public skepticism. Shanghai Green Express Foods Company is responsible for the school lunches of over 500 primary and secondary schools and kindergartens in Shanghai, providing more than 500,000 meals daily. The Shanghai case highlights that food safety issues in Chinese schools extend beyond the food itself to reveal broader safety concerns on campuses, including inadequate sanitation practices, insufficient staff training, and inadequate management of food services.
Food Safety Problems In Chinese Schools
Continuing food safety issues in Chinese education institutions, the issue of school cafeterias in Shanghai is not an isolated case. China has the largest population of compulsory school students in the world, with a total of 188,400 compulsory education schools across the country and nearly 1.6 billion students. By the end of November 2025, market supervision departments across China inspected 575,400 school canteens and off-campus meal providers, handling 12,067 illegal cases, emphasizing the need to address this issue urgently.
One of the typical cases occurred in March 2021, when a primary school in China signed a catering agreement with a defendant to supply lunch to its students. On April 8, 2021, the restaurant operator added nitrite to the ribs supplied to the primary school, which caused food poisoning symptoms in 56 students. After diagnosis, the above students were all nitrite-poisoned. Testing of the ribs, rib soup, and vomit from the affected students revealed the presence of nitrite in all samples. The nitrite content in the rib soup was nearly 1.4 g, which is significantly higher than the allowed limit.
In China, nitrites are allowed to be used in pork-related processed foods at a maximum of 0.15g. However, in this case the restaurant violated the regulations by adding nearly 10 times as much nitrite to the lunches of Chinese elementary school students. This incident indicates that, despite the Supreme People's Court of China issuing a series of judicial interpretations in the field of food safety, it is still unable to effectively regulate restaurants cooperating with Chinese primary and secondary schools. To address the earlier incident and prevent nitrite poisoning, the relevant departments of the State Council issued a notice that clearly bans catering services from buying, storing, or using nitrites, allowing only food production companies to use them.
It is worthy to compare the two largest countries' school food safety. As previously mentioned, in 2026, China has approximately 160 million students enrolled in compulsory education, while the United States has 36.1 million students. The population of Chinese primary and junior high school students is approximately 4.43 times larger than the U.S.
Take the food safety regulation of public schools in New York City as a comparative case between the United States and China's "Campus Food Safety Guardian Action Plan (2020-2022)." China focuses on specialized regulations, parental involvement, and administrative responsibility, while the United States emphasizes HACCP-style risk control, external health inspections, violation point systems, and document transparency. Overall, New York schools need to undergo government external inspections with the DOHMH for campus food, whereas in China, campus food regulation is the responsibility of the principal.
The Bidding Trap Contributed To Low Prices Undercut Student Health
School meal programs in China usually involve a bidding system. Neglecting food quality and supervision in favor of price, scale, and convenience during bidding poses significant risks, as it may lead to compromised food safety standards, substandard ingredients, and potential health hazards for students. Winning bids at low prices may force suppliers to cut food costs, which means the problem is not just that "the suppliers are inadequate" but that the incentive mechanisms allow unqualified suppliers to enter schools. The Shanghai Municipal Market Supervision Administration's situation report reveals that GreenExpress Foods colluded with several bidding agencies to illegally win bids for 86 meal service projects on campuses by organizing accompanying companies to engage in collusive bidding.
Any legally registered catering company in China can participate in a publicly tendered campus meal project. The primary factor is illegal collusion and cooperation between the school and the catering company. In this case, with the school and the catering company having reached an agreement before the bidding, GreenExpress Foods only needed to locate at least two other companies to accompany the bid. The second factor is the delayed update of information in the bidding process. When a school is already suspected of illegal acts but can still win the bid, it indicates that there is no effective regulatory mechanism to prevent food companies with criminal cases from participating in bidding for food safety on school campuses. Ineffective bidding processes and supervision mechanisms by schools, the private sector, and the government can jeopardize the food safety and health of minors on campus.
Future
Overall, the Chinese government and private sectors are both improving existing systems for investigating school food. This includes the "Three-Year Action Plan for Campus Safety" and "Open Kitchens" programs started in 2020. Thorough inspections, parental supervision, law enforcement, and local government responsibility are important goals for managing school food safety. The reform trajectory, shown by the notice on school food safety issued for the Autumn 2024 semester, highlighted the importance of transparency, accountability, and collaboration among schools, parents, local governments, and relevant authorities to protect the students' well-being. Additionally, the government has increased penalties for violations of food safety regulations in schools to deter negligence and ensure compliance with standards. Furthermore, the Guidelines on Food Safety and Dietary Fund Management in Primary and Secondary Schools, released in the same year, outlined specific protocols for ensuring food safety and managing dietary funds in educational institutions. Moreover, private enterprises have introduced banking applications that allow parents to directly top up their children's meal accounts, going beyond the government-led reforms for campus food safety. Furthermore, schools may need to collaborate with banks to establish distinct public accounts for managing school meal funds. This measure would effectively prevent bribery and the misuse of public funds in private account transactions.
