Nedelino Municipality has launched a €42,600 public procurement procedure, excluding VAT, for the supply of food products under the “Warm Lunch” project.
But the tender documents appear to send the food simultaneously to Nedelino and to Negushevo village in Sofia Region, start the product list with item No. 2, confuse grams, kilograms and quantities, refer bidders to missing forms and assess delivery times using formulas that are difficult to apply.
The errors, internal contradictions and lack of basic logical consistency between the individual documents raise questions as to whether adequate and comparable bids can be submitted under the procedure at all.
The tender was published on August 28, with a deadline for submitting bids of September 8.
The selected contractor will be expected to supply food products for 118 working days.
The estimated value is €42,600 excluding VAT, or €51,120 including VAT.
At first glance, this is a routine procurement for bread, dairy and meat products, fruit, vegetables, canned goods and other food for a social kitchen.
A closer reading, however, makes the documents look like mechanically assembled fragments from different tenders — documents that nobody appears to have read from beginning to end.
The food is supposed to be delivered both in Nedelino and Sofia Region
The most obvious contradiction concerns the delivery location.
The draft contract states that the products must be delivered to the canteen in the Pension building in Nedelino, at 80 Aleksandar Stamboliyski Street.
The technical specification, however, requires the contractor to make deliveries “franco warehouse of the Social Services Centre – Negushevo village”.
Negushevo is located in Gorna Malina Municipality, Sofia Region, where there is indeed a Home Social Patronage service and a “Warm Lunch” project.
This is almost certainly wording left over from the documentation of another municipality.
But this is not an innocent typo.
Delivering food in Nedelino is one thing. Delivering it hundreds of kilometres away is quite another.
The tender starts with product No. 2
The bill of quantities also fails even a basic formal check.
The list starts directly with item No. 2 — standard bread.
Product No. 1 does not exist.
It is unclear whether only the number was omitted or whether an entire product has disappeared from the table, one which bidders are nevertheless expected to include in their price calculations.
The errors continue.
Meatballs are listed as “0.60 g”, which literally means less than one gram each.
Pasta is specified in a “0.400 g” package, breadcrumbs in “0.500 g” and starch in “0.60 g”.
The person who prepared the documents presumably meant kilograms, or perhaps 60 grams in some cases.
But in a public procurement procedure, prices cannot be calculated on the basis of assumptions.
The entry for dried celery is even more absurd.
The package size is given as 0.010 kg, the unit of measurement is “kg”, while the quantity is 600.
This could mean 600 packets of 10 grams each.
But what is actually written means 600 kilograms of dried celery.
Bidders are asked for forms that have not been published
The documentation requires bidders to submit a technical proposal using Form No. 1, a price proposal using Form No. 2 and a bill of quantities using Form No. 2.1.
Among the published files, however, there is only the tender documentation, the technical specification, the draft contract and the evaluation methodology.
The forms on which the most important parts of the bids are supposed to be submitted are missing.
The absence of the price table is particularly significant.
Without it, bidders have no clear way of knowing how unit prices should be entered, how the total value should be calculated or how the offers will be compared.
At the same time, the documentation warns that failure to comply with its requirements will lead to disqualification.
A bidder could therefore be penalised for failing to complete a document that the contracting authority has not provided.
There is no “quality” criterion, but deadlines are worth 60 points
The procurement will be awarded according to the criterion of “best value for money”.
The quality of the food products, however, is not actually evaluated.
Price accounts for 40 points.
The remaining 60 points are divided between the overall delivery time, the bread delivery time and the time for replacing products following a complaint.
The municipality has set only maximum deadlines — 72 hours for delivery and 48 hours for replacement.
No minimum deadlines have been specified.
The methodology therefore turns the procurement into a competition in promises.
A bidder offering a higher price can compensate for the difference by promising extremely short delivery times, even though the feasibility of those promises is not assessed.
There is also double scoring.
First, 20 points are awarded for the delivery time of food products, without bread being explicitly excluded.
Then another 20 points are awarded specifically for bread delivery.
The promises are measured in hours, the penalties in days
The lack of logic continues in the draft contract.
Bidders receive points for every shorter delivery period, calculated in hours.
The penalty for delay, however, is defined “for each day of delay”.
If the winning bidder earns points by promising delivery within one hour but delivers after 10 or 20 hours, it has failed to meet its own commitment.
Yet it cannot be penalised because there has been no full day of delay.
It is also unclear when the delivery period starts running.
In one section, a written order is required.
Elsewhere, requests may apparently be changed by telephone.
In the event of a dispute over a delay, either party could therefore claim a different time at which the notification was received.
What is the value of the contract?
There is also a contradiction concerning the value of the future contract.
The technical specification states that the contract will be concluded at the estimated value of €42,600 excluding VAT, which will represent the maximum amount available for orders.
The draft contract, however, requires the total value to be entered according to the contractor’s price offer.
The methodology also evaluates the total price offered.
It is therefore unclear whether the contract will be for the fixed €42,600 or for the lower price proposed by the winning bidder.
One interpretation would mean that bidders compete only through their unit prices, while all of them would have access to the same maximum budget.
The other would mean that the total bid price becomes the maximum value of the contract.
Outdated regulations in a new tender
The 2026 documents also refer to European legislation that was repealed years ago.
For eggs, they cite Regulation No. 589/2008, which is no longer in force.
The personal data protection clause refers to Directive 95/46/EC, repealed in 2018 when the General Data Protection Regulation came into force.
For conflicts of interest, the documents cite Regulation No. 966/2012, which has also been replaced.
The highest price wins
The methodology is particularly significant in light of Nedelino Municipality’s previous tender for the supply of food products under the “Warm Lunch” project.
In 2025, three bids were submitted.
ET “Stefan Gyoladzhiev” offered €44,473.96 excluding VAT, “Adi – SM” Ltd offered €56,741.20, and “Gabi – RG” Ltd offered €59,887.82.
The contract was ultimately signed with the company that had submitted the highest price.
Its bid was €15,413.86, or 34.7%, higher than the lowest offer.
ET “Stefan Gyoladzhiev” was disqualified for failing to provide the required description of where and how it would source organic products.
The evaluation committee additionally pointed out that the certificate cited by the company from Smart Organic did not contain Combined Nomenclature codes for pork and yoghurt and specifically checked whether codes 0203 and 0403 were included.
The committee did not apply the same approach to “Gabi – RG”, whose bid listed only general chapters of the Combined Nomenclature — “02 Meat and edible meat offal” and “04 Dairy produce”.
“Adi – SM” passed the technical stage but was disqualified after the committee rejected its justification for the proposed price.
The company had explained that it operated a shop and warehouse in central Nedelino, received preferential prices from suppliers, used its existing staff and paid BGN 50 a month for a specialised vehicle.
According to the committee, however, the company had failed to provide specific analyses demonstrating how these conditions translated into its final price.
“Gabi – RG” was therefore left as the only bidder admitted to evaluation.
Its offer received 100 points for price, delivery time and response time for complaints because there was no longer another bidder against which it could be compared.
The minutes also show what kind of promises such a methodology can produce.
“Adi – SM” had offered a five-minute delivery time and five-minute response time for complaints, while “Gabi – RG” offered ten minutes.
The municipality is now once again setting up a competition based on delivery times, but this time deadlines account for 60% of the entire score, without establishing a realistic lower limit.
When bidders are forced to guess
A public procurement procedure is expected to establish equal, clear and predetermined conditions.
Two bona fide bidders should be able to read the documents and reach the same conclusion about what they must deliver, how much, where and within what timeframe.
With Nedelino Municipality’s tender, that appears impossible.
Bidders are left to guess whether they are delivering to Nedelino or Negushevo village, what product is missing under No. 1, whether the municipality wants 600 kilograms of dried celery or 600 packets, how much a single meatball weighs, which unpublished form they should use to submit their prices and what happens if someone enters a delivery time of one minute.
