An all-natural buyer’s guide

Food vendors doing business with Overlake Hospital Medical Center (OHMC), in Seattle, know without ambiguity what products the hospital’s hospitality dining services department does and does not want. That’s because Chris Linaman, Overlake’s executive chef, has spelled everything out for them in a three-page document entitled “OHMC Comprehensive Food Policy to Promote Individual & Environmental Health.”

The document, which is an extension of OHMC’s Healthy Food in Health Care pledge signed in 2007, places a heavy emphasis on local sourcing, plant-based proteins, and on food produced without high-fructose corn syrup and without “synthetic pesticides and hormones or antibiotics given to animals in the absence of diagnosed disease; including foods and/or ingredients produced without genetically modified organisms (GMOs).”

“My goal is basically to stop creating more patients,” Linaman says. “We have an obligation as a healthcare institution to promote health in any way possible. This guide helps us do that.”
GMOs—actually, a presentation about GMOs—were what led Linaman to create the policy his department now follows.

“In October 2011, I attended a FoodMed conference in Seattle,” Linaman explains. “The GMO issue came up, and in the presentation it was also suggested that you know the parameters of what you should be buying before you buy.”

That struck the chef as profound and he became, to use his word, “stoked.” Within a few days he had finished a rough draft, using as his template an old draft of a similar policy from Kaiser Permanente he’d found online.

He worked with his boss, Mark Eggleston, and with administration—“our policy had to be fiscally viable”—to craft the document’s final form. Within two months, it had become hospital policy.

“We send copies out to all our vendors, especially those who are new,” he explains. “It saves times, since they already know what we expect, and they use it as an education piece for their own people so they can understand where we’re coming from.”

The document states OHMC’s purpose in creating the policy, lists its statement of principles and spells out the criteria the department uses in selecting products for purchase. Some examples:

Linaman admits that some vendors have not been happy with Overlake’s new rules, but he believes not only that the hospital is taking the right approach but also that others are prepared to follow suit.

“This [document] has resulted in some lively conversations,” he says. “Not everyone agrees with what we’re doing. There have been some companies that have stopped doing business with us. But I think they will change their tunes as more and more healthcare institutions ask for these types of products.”