The ready-to-eat meals were originally intended to be distributed to over 100,000 students and teachers from more than 90 schools as part of this year’s Food Resilience Preparedness Programme, an initiative led by SFA.
Beyond the schools, it had also planned to work with AIC to distribute the meals to seniors at Active Ageing Centres across the island, with over 8,000 seniors across 111 centres taking part.
The meals were developed by SATS for public consumption during national emergencies. Leveraging its experience in producing army combat rations, SATS designed these meals to be stored without refrigeration and eaten at room temperature, and to have a shelf life of up to eight months.
SOTA students had been provided with the meals on Tuesday as part of Exercise SG Ready, which simulates crises such as power outages and disruptions to food supplies under the Total Defence banner.
The affected students form about 1 per cent of the total number of students in the school who consumed the ready-to-eat meals, said SFA, MOE, the Ministry of Health and SATS on Wednesday.
