Only 1 bid for Makati’s cake project

Instead of the anticipated 300 bidders, only one showed up on Monday to make an offer for the contract to supply Makati City’s senior citizens with birthday cakes.

During the opening of the bids held at City Hall, only Goldilocks Bakeshop was present. It submitted a bid of P8.7 million for the 31,187 birthday cakes to be distributed between Aug. 15 and Dec. 15 this year. The city government’s approved budget for the cake-giving program is P9.3 million.

Bids and awards committee chair Danilo Villas said that the cake manufacturer’s bid documents would have to be validated within seven calendar days before they could determine whether or not to award the contract.

He added that should their verification show that Goldilocks had complied with all the requirements, it would get the contract. But if this is not the case, the city government would open the project to other bidders.

Villas noted that Goldilocks Bakeshop was also the only cake supplier that bought bid documents for the project, which cost P10,000.

“We published the announcement in a newspaper and we waited for other bidders to give them equal opportunity but only Goldilocks participated in the bidding,” he said.

The search for a new birthday cake supplier for the city’s senior citizens came a month after acting Makati Mayor Romulo Peña announced that he would bid out the contract through “an honest and proper process.”

Peña, who assumed office after Mayor Junjun Binay was ordered suspended by the Office of the Ombudsman over allegations that the Makati City Science High School building was overpriced, said that he was in favor of continuing the cake-giving project although he wanted the goodies to be “more affordable, tastier and branded.”

He added that one of the major reasons he wanted to bid out the project was to avoid controversy after the program came under fire when lawyer Renato Bondal alleged in a Senate hearing last year that the cakes being given out during Binay’s term were overpriced.–Maricar B. Brizuela