Powerful combination: Healthcare and school foodservice groups join procurement forces

School Food Focus and Health Care Without Harm are both striving to make positive changes—for people and for the planet—by way of procurement in schools and in hospitals, respectively.

Now the two groups are joining forces in a collaboration called ProCureWorks, which counts as its members more than 530 schools and 55 hospitals across three California communities.

First, a little background about each of the groups:

“Since 2005, we’ve been working with the healthcare sector on improving the foodservice operations within their facilities,” says Lucia Sayre, Western U.S. regional director, Healthy Food in Health Care for Health Care Without Harm.

Similarly, “our mission in School Food Focus is to catalyze change in the school food system by changing how food is purchased,” says Toni Liquori, executive director of School Food Focus. “We’re trying to pull the demand together on the school food side and introduce that to the supply side.”

And that’s the common idea: that increasing the demand within these formidable onsite markets for healthy food that’s local and sustainable can be a catalyst for positive change up and down the supply chain and within communities and food economies throughout the country.

The worlds of school foodservice and hospital foodservice have some commonalities, but also some differences.

The biggest difference, in a nutshell, is that “schools don’t have as much flexibility in their contracting and purchasing, while hospitals have a little more flexibility…and a little more money,” Sayre says. “But the schools have incredible volume. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of students.”

The network currently includes eight healthcare systems representing 55 facilities: John Muir Health, Kaiser Permanente, Palomar Health System, San Francisco Veteran’s Affairs, Stanford Medical Center, Sutter Health, UC Medical Centers and Washington Hospital Health System. The school districts participating in ProCureWorks include: Davis Joint Unified School District, Elk Grove Unified School District, Oakland Unified School District, Oxnard Elementary School District and San Diego Unified School District. 

Sayre describes healthcare and school foodservice together as “a powerful combination.”

How powerful? The combined purchasing power is $100 million.

Harnessing that power into one group made up of the two segments through ProCureWorks has the potential for not just greater purchasing power and influence over distributors and manufacturing companies, but for the opportunity to learn more about the supply chain in a changing world.

“It’s not just figuring out how the two sectors can align their standards and procurements; it’s also about how two organizations in two completely difference sectors can work together,” Sayre says. “It really is groundbreaking.”

To get started on the work, “we started drilling down to which foods we wanted to change first,” Liquori says, explaining that the mission was broken into three product categories: beef, chicken and whole grains.

Criteria being built around those categories include being raised or grown in California, meeting the standards of the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act and standards from the two groups: School Food Focus’ Ingredient Guide for Better Food Purchasing and Health Care Without Harm’s sustainable purchasing guidelines.

“Once those product categories were identified, we came to an understanding and alignment around our sustainability criteria that would work for both schools and hospitals,” Sayre says.

The group aims to aggregate the demand for grass-fed beef, whole grain pasta that’s more than the standard 51 percent whole grain (and actually delicious) and also poultry that’s free of antibiotics.

In working with manufacturers to develop products, participating schools and hospitals take part in learning labs and taste testing, in which “manufacturers ship products and then keep working on it and working on it until we think the folks who will be eating it will like it,” Liquori says.

Already, a step towards transparency has happened in the chicken category. Thanks to pressure from ProCureWorks, California’s largest poultry producer, Foster Farms, has announced a line of No Antibiotics Ever poultry products.

As the collaboration continues, the effectiveness of the collaboration itself is being studied by UC Davis, and the project is continually being evaluated from within to become more nimble, resetting and growing from knowledge that’s been gathered.

In terms of far-reaching impact, the changes pioneered by ProCureWorks could benefit many more schools and hospitals than just the members.

“These initial participants are setting the stage,” Sayre says. “Then, any school district or hospital who isn’t participating in ProCureWorks can still notice in their US Foods or Sysco catalog, ‘Oh, there’s whole grain pasta…there’s healthier chicken.’ The idea is not limiting this to the initial participants.”