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Sustainable Food Procurement Initiative >

To organize and demonstrate demand for sustainable food choices in institutional settings, and to solicit and assist institutional food service companies to offer and promote sustainable food choices.

Every day, organizations buy and consume food in their offices, at meetings, and at events of all sizes. And while individual consumers increasingly have a wide spectrum of food choices that include sustainably-raised foods, organizations as a rule do not. Institutional food purveyors offer few or no sustainable selections, perceiving no financial advantage in doing so.

The SFPI intends to demonstrate to these purveyors that demand does exist, assist them in making genuinely sustainable offerings, and in making these offerings a competitive advantage (and eventually, a competitive necessity.) SFPI seeks to leverage the way non-profit organizations, socially responsible businesses, and conscientious businesses spend their considerable resources on food among the hundreds of thousands of conference events and daily operations that involve millions of attendees and employees. These organizations and institutions, if mobilized, are in a position to have sufficient impact to begin institutional change toward supporting agricultural production that enhances our health, the environment, and the social and economic strength of our communities.

Across the United States, non-profit organizations, responsible businesses, institutions and governments use both creative and traditional avenues to improve our ecosystems, health, and economies. Yet many of these same organizations source factory-farmed, mono-cropped, chemical-laden foods for consumption in their offices and at meetings and events. To do otherwise is sometimes seems just too difficult and time-consuming.

We intend to work with organizations to encourage them to act in concert to insist that their purveyors offer sustainable choices. Insisting on family-farmed, sustainably-raised meats and local produce is an effective and direct and meaningful action in a form that institutional businesses can understand: it represents demand.

This initiative will begin with introducing purchasing guidelines and will provide technical support throughout the food procurement process to promote healthy and sustainable agriculture. The SFPI toolkit will include resources, a model purchasing policy, ongoing support and in special circumstances, we hope to offer some financial assistance to help with the initial increase in costs for institutions’ procurement of sustainable, family-farmed produce and meats for events.

For many organizations and institutions, this merely means aligning purchasing choices with their existing principles. Acting alone, this may seem daunting. Acting in concert, it can have great power.