Alternative Avenues for Local Food in Schools - Ingredients for Success
The Alternative Avenues for Local Food Procurement in Ontario Schools project seeks to address the need for assessment, analysis, training, and barrier identification to increase the quantity of local foods procured in Ontario School Boards.
Read moreLocal Sustainable Food Procurement For Municipalities and BPS
Sustain Ontario has developed a toolkit geared towards Ontario municipalities and broader public sector institutions looking to initiate sustainable procurement policies and programs in their regions. Learn more about the Local Sustainable Food Procurement For Municipalities and BPS on Sustain Ontario's Website.
Case Study - Farm to Institution: the Power of Public Sector Purchasing
This case study explores how public institutions can use the procurement process to maximize the impact of their collective $750 million annual food spends. The case described spans four years and focuses on how a public sector group purchasing organization leveraged its buying power to enable a local sustainable cattle-processor to break into the institutional food service market. The case demonstrates how public sector purchasing contributes to bringing local and sustainable farming an food businesses to scale.
Conducting Food Origin Audits: A Step-by-Step Guide
St. Joseph’s Heath System created a guide to help organizations and institutions conduct food origin audits. The guide includes steps involved in food origin audits, details, and examples for each of the steps, as well as useful tools, such as a template for a letter of endorsement.
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Local Food Procurement Policy – Independent Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF) Seniors Home Inc.
This Local Food Procurement Policy was put in place by IOOF Seniors Home Inc. in Barrie, to ensure residents are provided with fresh seasonal foods purchased from local vendors. IOOF Seniors Home Inc. developed local food menus to help make sure that purchasing practices take into consideration seasonal availability of produce while managing cost impacts of local procurement.
Local Food Provision in Ontario’s Hospitals and Long-Term Care Facilities: Recommendations for Stakeholders
This report is the third deliverable for Food for Health Project 200218 - “Exploring the Feasibility and Benefits of Incorporating Local Foods into Ontario’s Healthcare System”
The project objectives are to:
- Establish the current state of food provision in Ontario's healthcare system.
- Gain an in-depth understanding of the opportunities and constraints impacting food provision decisions in Ontario's healthcare system.
- Provide alternative perspectives on healthcare food provision and the potential for changing these practices.
- Understand implementation details for making changes at the individual facility level.
Assessing and Identifying Opportunities to Buy More Local Apples in the Broader Public Sector
Public sector institutions are sourcing apple products from across the continent, and whole apples from around the world. But most facilities would love to integrate more Ontario product into the menus, meals, and snacks.
Working closely with the Ontario Apple Growers, My Sustainable Canada identified product opportunities for Ontario's apple growers to more strategically develop, pack, and market products to Ontario health care facilities, public school boards, colleges/universities, and correctional facilities, in order to increase the sales of Ontario apple products.
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Read Procurement Steps for Correctional & Youth Justice Facilities
A Guide To Developing A Sustainable Food Purchasing Policy
This document is intended to help universities, colleges, hospitals, and other institutions – as well as those advocating for food system change – create, promote and implement practical sustainable food purchasing policies.
It draws from the successes and lessons learned by a variety of institutions from within the United States, and from the experience of for-profit and nonprofit partners that have worked with institutions in this arena. This document does not promote any particular policy positions, but rather offers a framework to help you develop policies that will be meaningful and achievable for your institution. This document is a product of the Sustainable Food Policy Project, which was initiated in 2006 to support efforts by educational, healthcare and other institutions to have a positive impact on the food system through purchasing.
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Best Practice In Sustainable Public Sector Food Procurement
Many regional public procurement strategies are now being developed and are actively seeking to meet wider sustainability aims.
Creativity in defining the procurement need may be one of the strongest lines of opportunity for realizing sustainable development objectives. If the objective is to provide healthy meals for schoolchildren, for example, there may be several ways in which this can be done. For example, through setting up separate supply and delivery contracts, linked to initiatives that support opportunities for local trading such as ‘meet the buyer’ events and more proactive approaches to inviting interest by local producers.
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Local Food Procurement Policies: A Literature Review
Our food system has become increasingly globalized over the past few decades. Whereas a century ago most food was consumed in a relatively short distance from where it was produced, our diets today consist of foods from all corners of the globe.
The trend toward increasing distances between producers and consumers has prompted many to question the environmental and social sustainability of our food choices. Local farms are struggling to compete with larger, more industrialized farms in warmer climates. Products from California, for example, are dependent on publicly funded roads and transportation networks, and on vast subsidized irrigation networks that are not factored into the cost of food. This food is sent all over the continent, supplanting local production, because the price of the food is not reflecting the real costs associated with its production. The real costs of food production include environmental costs, such as the effects of climate change due to increased CO2 emissions from increased food transportation, as well as social degradation due to the loss of farms and rural communities, to name a few.