Report Analyzes How Public Food Purchasing Can Promote Food Justice

Public institutions such as schools, hospitals, and cultural venues, spend about $120 billion buying food, annually. The largest food corporations capture the lion’s share of these dollars, largely by exploiting workers and the environment and offering kickbacks that smaller players cannot match. Just three companies, Aramark, Sodexo, and Compass Group, control 77.5% of the food service management industry.

Food justice advocates have long sought to use democratic control over public purchasing to shift resources away from harmful corporations and into businesses that build up the community. This policy is called “values-based procurement,” because it prioritizes purchases that reflect community values, such as equity, environmental sustainability, or local development. One of the biggest values-based procurement efforts in the U.S. is the Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP). Municipalities including Illinois’s Cook County, the City of Los Angeles, and Boston, as well as major school districts in San Francisco, Washington D.C., and Austin, have all adopted the GFPP and thus committed to buying more local, humane, and healthy foods from suppliers with responsible labor and environmental practices.

A new report by two coalitions, the Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA) and the HEAL Food Alliance, analyzes the first decade of GFPP’s progress. Entitled, “Procuring Food Justice,” it identifies policies to better advance two important priorities: workers’ well-being and racial equity.

The Los Angeles Food Policy Council, a network of over 400 organizations that began as a policy task force for the Mayor’s Office, created the GFPP in 2012 to advance five public interest goals: a valued workforce, animal welfare, environmental sustainability, nutrition, and strong local economies. The Los Angeles Mayor issued an executive order requiring all city and public school food purchases to adopt the GFPP, and since then dozens of school districts, hospital systems, parks districts, and other public institutions across 10 cities have followed suit.

When a city or school district adopts the GFPP, they commit to buy more food from suppliers that advance the five goals. The GFPP sets program-wide “good food” standards based on input from community organizations. First, a school district or city must meet the baseline requirements for each of the five goals to get verified as a Good Food Provider. Institutions have different options to get there, but generally, they need to spend a certain portion of their food budget on products from suppliers that meet the program standards (like, 5% of their food must come from small farms within 250 miles of their school). To remain a Good Food Provider, those good food purchases need to increase over time. Additionally, GFPP institutions need to ensure that all their suppliers (not just the “good” ones) respect their workers’ right to organize, abide by labor laws, and do not use forced labor. A national nonprofit, the Center for Good Food Purchasing, audits participants’ purchasing data annually, verifies their progress, and updates the Good Food Purchasing Standards as needed.

Since 2012, schools and cities in the GFPP have increased their humane animal product purchases by 50% and the median portion of their budgets spent on local food from small- to mid-sized businesses has grown from 14% to 22%. That translates to over $56 million for local businesses, $20 million for unionized workplaces, and $4 million for environmentally friendly farms. 

The HEAL Food Alliance and the FCWA have worked with grassroots coalitions across the country to win GFPP policies since the program started. Along with these local groups, HEAL and FCWA built a campaign, called Good Food Communities, that pushes for public food purchases to better advance racial, worker, and climate justice, as well as supply chain transparency. Their new report summarizes years of their collective work and dozens of interviews with workers, farmers, and organizers to identify how the GFPP can better support worker organizing and small-scale Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC)-owned businesses and farms.

The report found that coalition members’ organizing has been key to expanding and enforcing the GFPP. For example, in Los Angeles, the local Teamsters union alerted the school board that one of their food distributors was intimidating workers trying to organize. The school board successfully threatened to pull the distributor’s contract for union busting, and the workers eventually voted to form a union and bargained for a contract to raise their wages from $13 per hour to a minimum of $19. All told the GFPP has helped create 220 new union warehouse and transportation jobs in LA County since 2012.

However, the report also found barriers for workers to leverage the GFPP. For one, not all workers know about the GFPP: a survey of Chicago-area warehouse workers found that 83% didn’t know that they had GFPP labor protections. More broadly, GFPP employers such as Smithfield can use retaliation and other tactics, like sending injured workers to in-house nurses instead of the hospital, to avoid OSHA violations and other disclosures that would trigger a GFPP labor violation. Enforcement depends on strong relationships between workers’ organizations and other GFPP coalitions to turn workers’ on-the-ground oversight into real supplier accountability, the report argues.

Insufficient supply chain transparency poses another issue. Institutions cannot hold suppliers accountable for labor violations if they don’t know who all their supplier’s suppliers are. Large corporations source food from a vast network of farms, plants, and warehouses, and after 10 years of trying, schools and municipalities in the GFPP have not been able to get these companies to share complete supply chain sourcing data, the report found.

The GFPP urges public institutions to invest in small to mid-sized or cooperatively owned farms in order to deconcentrate food production and support local economies. This includes prioritizing BIPOC producers, who have historically been excluded from owning farmland, getting credit, or accessing markets.

FCWA and HEAL studied two organizations that aggregate and sell products from farmers of color, Dawn2Dusk in Minnesota and Agri-Cultura Cooperative Network in New Mexico, and one organization that connects low-income BIPOC communities with local food, the Corbin Hill Food Project in New York. These organizations reported barriers to accessing services and financing, making it risky to invest in the infrastructure and scale necessary to serve institutional markets. While these producers wanted and, in some cases, benefited from the steady income of an institutional contract, it wasn’t always clear that low wholesale prices would pay off. “Measures need to be taken to address the infrastructure gaps resulting from these years of discriminatory policies,” said Winston Moore, lead researcher for the report, at a webinar Tuesday.

Part of the issue is pricing. Some local laws require that public institutions offer contracts to the lowest cost responsible bidder that meets their basic needs. This obviously creates a major barrier for smaller food businesses to compete with massive corporations and prevents institutions from picking vendors with broader societal benefits, like fair wages or more diverse ownership. There are ways for institutions to break from lowest cost bidder requirements. For instance, New York City’s procurement policy allows producers that meet their values-based criteria to charge 10% more for their goods than the lowest cost bidder. Procurement policies can also redefine what it means to be a “responsible bidder,” which the City of Los Angeles did in 2000 to require that all government contractors prove labor law compliance.

These are just two of the policy changes that the report recommends to strengthen the next decade of GFPP’s work. To increase transparency, the report says that all GFPP bids and contracts should require suppliers to disclose all their suppliers or subcontractors. We know corporations can provide this information because anti-sweatshop campaigns have successfully mandated and publicized similar vendor disclosures. The report also calls for GFPP suppliers to notify workers about their GFPP rights, including protections to organize, and it generally urges greater partnership with frontline workers to enforce the GFPP. To close the market access gap for BIPOC producers, the report advocates for policies to subsidize investments in physical and technical infrastructure. Finally, it urges policymakers to ban exclusionary kickbacks, which the largest food corporations use to lock up a large portion of all sales with food distributors and cafeteria contractors.